Welcome back to This Week, the series where I dive into the hot topics you should stay updated on from the last 7 days in the Digital Marketing industry.
So grab your coffee (or reheat it for the third time if you’re also parenting small children), and let’s get into it.
Google Wants to Be Your Customer’s Personal Shopper
If there was a theme this week, it was that Google is getting really comfortable inserting itself into more and more of the customer journey. Following all the AI announcements from Google I/O, marketers spent this week unpacking what those updates actually mean.
Google doesn’t just want to help people find products anymore. It wants to help them compare, track, research, and eventually buy products. As a marketer, that’s both fascinating and a little terrifying.
For years, the goal was simply to get someone to your website. But it hasn’t been a secret that Google increasingly is aiming to keep people within Google for as much of that journey as possible.
Don’t worry, websites aren’t going anywhere. But the bad news is that brands relying solely on organic traffic are going to need to make adjustments quickly to their strategy.
The biggest take away is that visibility still matters more than rankings. And your content, reviews, and reputation need to show up wherever AI is pulling information from.
AI Is Taking Work Away From Agencies
Another story that caught my attention this week was how many large companies are using AI to bring marketing work in-house. But don’t start writing another “marketing is dead” LinkedIn post just yet because the work AI is replacing tends to be the production work.
The repetitive work like resizing a banner sixteen times or creating another graphic version for Facebook. The stuff that’s harder to automate is still strategy, creativity, brand positioning, and truly understanding human behavior. The work that actually makes marketing interesting.
This isn’t new news either as we’ve been seeing this shift across many industries. My recommendation is to not only analyze and adjust what your team is doing in-house, but also push your partners and vendors on how they are making these shifts too.
Google’s New Favorite Word Is Credibility
Have you noticed how Google has an obsession with showing where AI-generated answers come from? This week there were more updates around source attribution and highlighting original reporting. Which might sound incredibly boring until you realize what it actually means.
Google is basically telling us how they are prioritizing content. And every update they’ve been rolling out is reinforcing the same thing and that’s expertise, authority, and trust matters.
If you’ve been following along with the Mom is Marketing blog, you know I’ve been saying that AEO and GEO aren’t some magical new strategy. They’re just good marketing.
Continue to consistently create useful content and build trust, following the core SEO best practices, and you’ll reap the rewards of AI system references.
Search Is Getting Creepy
Researchers found signs this week that Google’s AI recommendations may be influenced by information from Gmail and other Google products. In other words, the recommendations users see could potentially be shaped by brands they’ve interacted with before, creating a more personalized search experience.
Now, personalization itself isn’t exactly new in the digital marketing world. Marketers have been using data to create more relevant experiences for years. What makes this conversation interesting is that privacy regulation has become an increasingly hot topic over the past several years, with consumers and regulators paying much closer attention to how personal data is collected and used. As AI becomes more integrated into search, I suspect we’ll continue to see the industry trying to balance personalization with growing privacy expectations.
Part of me understands the appeal. Better personalization can absolutely create a better user experience and help people find information that’s more relevant to them. The other part of me immediately thought, “So are we all just living in even bigger algorithm bubbles now?”
As marketers, this is worth paying attention to because brand familiarity may become even more valuable moving forward. If AI systems increasingly rely on past interactions and established relationships with brands, the companies people already know and trust could have an even greater advantage over brands trying to break through for the first time.
This reinforces a theme that brand building continues to matter, maybe more than ever. The businesses investing in awareness, trust, and recognition today may be setting themselves up for a stronger position in the AI-powered search experiences of tomorrow.
Everyone Is Talking About Citations Now
Remember when SEO conversations were mostly about rankings? This week, marketers were once again talking about citations. And not academic citations, AI citations.
Basically, everyone is trying to figure out why some brands get mentioned in AI-generated answers while others don’t. And the answer keeps coming back to the same core elements; strong expertise shown in content, original insights, clear authority, and consistent brand signals. (Plus continue to follow SEO and content creation best practices)
It’s almost annoying how often the answer ends up being “just create genuinely useful content” but there is no secret shortcut.
Final Thoughts From Your Marketing Mom Friend
If I had to summarize this entire week in one sentence, it would be: AI is making it easier than ever to create content, and harder than ever to earn trust.
But one thing hasn’t changed is that the businesses that help people, teach, solve real problems, and show up consistently are still the ones winning.
The tools are evolving, but human connection isn’t going anywhere. Use AI to your advantage but don’t outsource the authenticity of your brand.
Mom Is Marketing 
Leave a comment