The WordStream Blog

It’s no secret that AI has made its way into just about every portion of paid advertising strategy. In some ways, that can be a great thing, with the machines having access to many more data points that can oftentimes lead to better results than what we can do manually. They’re great at finding patterns in the user behaviors of our customers. But one area that they’re not great at: positioning our businesses in the way we want to be.

We all know that AI bots are scraping our sites, using what they find to deliver answers in chatbots and AI search. But just how frequently are the AI platforms hitting our sites? What pages are they most interested in? Are scrapes resulting in traffic? Or are AI bots just scraping our content to summarize in their results and train their bots without any real benefit to us? These are the questions our team has been asking for months.

Your business needs customers. Customers can’t buy from a business they’ve never heard of. Promotion is how you close that gap. The competition for attention is real: the SBA’s Office of Advocacy counts more than 36 million small businesses in the US as of its 2025 profile, most of them fighting for the same local eyeballs you are. The options can feel endless (read: overwhelming). The good news is you don’t need all of them.

LinkedIn Ads is one of my favorite platforms. I suggest it to nearly every B2B client we work with and the non-B2B folks as well! That said, I find that LinkedIn is the platform I hear the most failures from. Many, many people come to me and say they tested on LinkedIn, but they just couldn’t make it work. More often than not, it’s only because they tried to apply best practices and assumptions from other platforms onto LinkedIn, rather than adjusting for the unique channel that it is.

It used to be that marketers could take a beat in January, reflect on the year before, and (preflect?) on the trends to come. But marketing marches much faster now. To finish the second half of the year strong, we need to think about the shifts from the first six months and what they mean. Many of the trends I’ve tracked from Q1 and Q2 are, of course, AI-motivated. It’s changing how people search, when you can influence buyers, and how you manage paid ads.

They say a relaxed mind is a creative mind, but it’s hard to stay relaxed when you’re running a business—let alone in September when everyone’s switching gears. Lucky for you though, there’s a slew of events and themes in September that you can use for easy and creative marketing. And I’m not just talking Labor Day or Back to School… So in this article, I’m going to equip you with over 50 unique September marketing ideas, along with real examples from businesses just like yours.

Most businesses trying to show up in AI-generated answers are focused on their website. They’re tweaking copy, adding FAQ sections, and maybe looking into schema markup. That work matters, but it covers maybe 40% of how generative AI actually decides what to surface and who to credit when someone asks it a question.

Imagine you’re the owner of a local plumbing company. You’ve invested months into your SEO. You’re ranking number one for “how to fix a leaky faucet.” Google Search Console shows 1,400 visits a month to that page. Your agency sends you a report with a green arrow pointing up. Everything is looking good performance-wise, but your phone isn’t ringing. The problem isn’t your ranking. It’s the keyword you’re focusing on.

A marketer’s time is sacred. But it rarely gets spent on one big, satisfying task the way we’d all like it to. More often, it gets chipped away by repeat work: another summary, another cleanup pass, another batch of variations, another update someone needs by end of day. And don’t even get me started on the asks from the sales team. A lot of that work moves faster nowadays.

In May of 2026, Google announced that standalone Display campaigns are being absorbed into Demand Gen campaigns. The Google Display Network (GDN) itself isn’t going anywhere and isn’t changing substantially, but the way advertisers are able to purchase ad inventory on it will. In this post, I’m going to cover what’s changing and when, talk about why this change is taking place, then get into the tactical changes you should be making and understand what you should expect from this shift.