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It’s no surprise that February’s Digital Marketing headlines continued to focus a lot on new innovations in AI. From billions of investments in new tools to agencies slowing down enough to analyze how to use them, AI continues to drive digital marketing conversations.
Big Tech Invests Billions in AI
At Axios (source), Neil Irwin reports that Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet are gearing up for an unprecedented wave of AI-related capital expenditures, collectively expected to total around $650 billion to $650+ billion this year. Bloomberg/Reuters data indicate that Amazon alone plans around $200 billion in capex, while Google, Meta, and Microsoft are also scaling spending dramatically to build data centers, AI compute infrastructure, and related tools.
The surge highlights how hyperscale tech firms continue to bet heavily on AI despite investor concerns about near-term returns and tech stock volatility.
Google Makes Updates to Search Features
Over at Search Engine Journal (source), SEJ senior news writer Matt G. Southern covers a roundup of multiple Google search developments that hit in early February. Google has released a Discover-specific core update (initially in the U.S.), detailed how it plans to monetize AI Mode by testing ads under AI Mode responses, and cautioned against serving non-standard formats like Markdown to AI crawlers. Southern also reports that Google’s crawl team has filed bugs against problematic WooCommerce plugins and shared LinkedIn’s insights on what boosts visibility in AI-generated search results, underscoring a fragmented search ecosystem that SEOs must monitor across Discover, Search, and AI interfaces.
SEO Experts Weigh the Risks of AI Usage
At Search Engine Land (source), contributor Claire Taylor argues that while artificial intelligence can dramatically speed up repetitive SEO tasks (like drafting meta descriptions or clustering keywords), there’s a growing risk of losing differentiation, trust, and human judgment if teams over-automate. Taylor explains that replacing strategy, positioning, final messaging, or any customer-facing work entirely with AI can erode authority, weaken quality, and make brands indistinguishable.
The key takeaway: AI should be deployed intentionally and responsibly, augmenting human insight rather than replacing it.
Google Discusses the Importance of Websites for Businesses
Back at Search Engine Journal (source), Southern covers a recent debate between Google Search Relations team members about whether businesses still need a website in 2026 during a “Search Off the Record” podcast. Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt didn’t give a hard yes/no answer but emphasized that it “depends” on your goals, audience, and where you want to be discoverable (while reminding that websites still offer advantages like control, monetization, and data ownership).
The key takeaway here is that in a multi-platform discovery landscape spanning social, apps, and AI interfaces, a website isn’t strictly required for every business, but it remains a durable way to reach the broadest audience.
Strategy in SEO Is More Important Than Ever
Also at Search Engine Land (source), Kristina Bergwall argues that modern search success requires building visibility systems rather than just chasing rankings, as AI-driven discovery changes how brands are interpreted and cited. Bergwall explains that today’s visibility is a function of structured data, consistent brand signals, and aligned messaging across product, PR, content, and technology (not just rankings on SERPs).
Her key insight is that brands must create organizational systems to govern how information is structured and validated so AI systems can understand and reuse it, shifting SEO from tactical optimizations to strategic information alignment.
LinkedIn’s Abandonment of Traditional SEO
Linkedin, which has gone through several changes over the past decade, is also hopping on the AI train in a big way. At PPC.Land (source), Luis Rijo reports that LinkedIn has abandoned traditional SEO after seeing as much as a 60% drop in non-brand organic traffic on awareness topics (even though rankings remained stable) due to AI-powered search experiences like AI Overviews reducing clicks. LinkedIn has formed a cross-functional AI Search Taskforce focused on visibility, citations, and mentions inside generative search instead of clicks, marking a fundamental shift from “rank → click → convert” to “be seen → be mentioned → be chosen.”
The takeaway: LinkedIn’s strategy evolution reflects how major platforms are adapting marketing measurement and optimization for AI-led discovery rather than traditional SEO traffic metrics.
Google Releases Gemini 3.1 Pro
Over at Google’s blog “The Keyword” (source), the Gemini team announced Gemini 3.1 Pro, an upgraded version of Google’s flagship AI model designed to handle more complex problem-solving and reasoning tasks than its predecessors. The model is rolling out in preview across developer, enterprise, and consumer products (including the Gemini API, Vertex AI, Gemini app, and NotebookLM) and shows significantly improved performance on advanced benchmarks.
With enhanced reasoning, data synthesis, and creative coding capabilities, Gemini 3.1 Pro aims to support more ambitious AI workflows beyond simple conversational answers.
Your SEO Needs to Be Good for Your GEO to Be Good
At Search Engine Journal (source), Shelley Walsh highlights insights from SEO veteran Grant Simmons in “Great SEO Is Good GEO — But Not Everyone’s Been Doing Great SEO.” Here, Simmons argues that the fundamentals of topical authority, signal alignment, and unique, data-driven content remain the basis of both traditional SEO and generative engine optimization (GEO), and that many brands haven’t been doing “great SEO” even before AI search emerged.
The article emphasizes that AI visibility is earned by content that aligns with real human intent and broad consensus—not by chasing surface-level AI tricks—and that SEO and GEO overlap when execution is strong.
ChatGPT’s New Ad Placements Requires Agencies to Adopt New Paid Ads Strategies
Finally, another piece in Search Engine Land (source), this time by Jenny Williamson, explores how ChatGPT’s new ad placements are fundamentally changing marketing strategy by embedding sponsored links under AI-generated responses rather than alongside traditional SERPs. Because conversational interfaces operate on intent-rich prompts rather than simple keyword matches, the old separation between SEO (focused on organic ranking) and paid media (focused on auctions and clicks) is dissolving.
The key implication is that SEO and paid ads teams must collaborate around prompt intelligence, unified messaging, and landing page alignment to maximize both organic AI visibility and ad performance in one hybrid conversational ecosystem.
Final Thoughts for February 2026
February’s headlines have given us a lot to chew on with AI advancements and how we should be implementing change. Drop us a line if you want to discuss any of these findings or let us know what you’ve been reading about in the digital marketing landscape!
