Michael Epps Utley {kind=image/jpg}
AI continued dominating digital marketing news in March. In some ways, this tech is disrupting the way digital marketers have been doing things for a long time. In other areas, AI is proving that certain tried-and-true marketing efforts and strategies are still useful. The question, then, is where to pivot and where to double down. This month’s roundup of headlines paints a clear picture.
Protect Your Brand by Using AI Selectively
At Search Engine Land (source), Carrie-Ann Sudlow explains that AI can dramatically accelerate SEO workflows, but it can also dilute brand identity if used carelessly. Sudlow recommends using AI primarily for research, data gathering, topic clustering, and outlining, while ensuring humans handle brand positioning and final editing. She stresses that AI will amplify whatever inputs it receives, meaning strong brand clarity leads to stronger AI-assisted content; vague positioning results in generic output.
The takeaway: treat AI as a scaling tool for efficiency, not a replacement for human strategy and voice.
AI Is Shifting the Way Brands Show Up in Search
At Digiday (source), Sam Bradley reports that the rise of AI-powered search experiences is forcing brands and agencies to rethink the traditional separation between SEO and paid search teams. As AI Overviews and generative search results reshape the SERP, marketers are increasingly coordinating organic insights with paid bidding strategies and shared reporting to capture visibility across both channels. Industry leaders at Digiday’s Media Buying Summit argued that treating SEO and PPC as separate functions now leaves brands “flying half-blind” in a search environment increasingly driven by AI and contextual queries.
Big Advancements in Image-Based Search
On Google Blog, "The Keyword," (source) Molly McHugh-Johnson explores how AI-powered visual search works behind tools like Google Lens and Circle to Search. Advances in multimodal AI now allow Google to analyze images by identifying multiple objects simultaneously, issuing several searches at once, and combining the results into a unified answer. This capability lets users analyze complex scenes (such as an entire outfit or a room design) rather than searching for items individually, reflecting a broader shift toward more natural, visual ways of interacting with search.
Major Updates Rolling Out in Google Maps
At The Associated Press (source), Michael Liedtke reports that Google is rolling out major AI updates to Google Maps powered by its Gemini technology, including a new “Ask Maps” conversational assistant and a redesigned Immersive Navigation view. Ask Maps lets users ask natural-language questions about directions, nearby stops, and personalized recommendations (like cafés or charging stations), while Immersive Navigation introduces 3D visuals to help orient drivers with roads, landmarks, and terrain. Google says the features are intended to make Maps feel more like an intelligent travel assistant. These tools are initially available in the U.S. and India on mobile before broader release. The update reflects Google’s push to compete with other AI navigation and assistant tools using generative capabilities.
Surface-Level SEO Tactics Are Becoming Outdated in the AI Era
At Search Engine Land (source), Dan Taylor argues that the traditional shortcuts and checklist tactics many marketers lean on won’t cut it in an AI-powered search world. Instead, real visibility comes from deeper signals like knowledge graphs, expert entities, and influence in trusted datasets, which are the kinds of structured, authoritative inputs that AI systems like Google’s AI Overviews and other generative engines actually surface. He suggests that focusing solely on superficial SEO tricks risks being invisible in AI-driven answers and summaries, and that brands should pursue more robust, foundational optimization strategies.
Defensive SEO Is Becoming Important for Brand Perception
Also at Search Engine Land (source), Stephanie Wallace discusses “Defensive SEO: How to protect your brand narrative in AI search,” explaining that as AI summarizes and evaluates brands before users ever visit a website, controlling how a brand is described becomes critically important. Defensive SEO emphasizes monitoring and shaping the sentiments and facts AI systems use when they generate responses about a brand, which includes addressing outdated or negative signals before generative tools cement them into synthesized answers. This approach goes beyond traditional SEO’s focus on rankings and traffic, centering instead on narrative accuracy, sentiment management, and proactive brand positioning in the era of AI summaries.
Showing Up in Search Now Requires More Than Traditional SEO Tactics
The hits keep coming from Search Engine Land (source), as this time Adam Heitzman explains that as search evolves toward AI-driven answers, the most valuable form of visibility isn’t ranking placements but being present in the consensus layer, the aggregated set of sources that generative models consider authoritative. Goodwin argues that SEO is shifting away from traditional rankings toward citation equity across trusted sources, structured data, and third-party references that feed into large-language-model outputs. The key takeaway: search visibility increasingly depends on being part of the knowledge network that AI systems draw from, not just earning traditional SERP positions.
Widely Used Marketing Dashboards Should Be Scrutinized for Accuracy
In CMSWire (source), Mariia Golitsyna reports that many widely used marketing dashboards offer misleading or incomplete insights, especially as privacy changes, cookieless environments, and AI-driven search patterns disrupt traditional tracking. Golitsyna highlights problems like attribution models that over-credit last-touch channels, dashboards hiding data volatility, and inconsistent integration with AI-derived results — all of which can give marketers a false sense of confidence. Her advice is to rethink reporting frameworks, align metrics more closely with actual business outcomes, and scrutinize dashboards for “illusion metrics” that look good but don’t drive growth.
Technical SEO Still Matters
Back at Search Engine Land (source), Bruce Clay urges practitioners to double down on fundamentals even as AI amplifies search complexity. Clay emphasizes key areas like site architecture, page experience, crawlability, structured data, URL normalization, and canonicalization as foundational prerequisites before tackling higher-order AI SEO challenges. His central point is that while AI and generative search are reshaping visibility, nothing replaces solid technical SEO hygiene, especially for ensuring that content is discoverable, interpretable, and usable by both classic crawlers and AI agents.
Online Bot Traffic Is Rapidly Increasing
At CNBC (source), Lola Murti reports that automated and AI-generated traffic is growing rapidly and could soon exceed human internet traffic, with bot activity rising far faster than human use. According to the report, AI traffic surged as much as 187 % in 2025, and agentic bot activity grew nearly 8,000%, raising alarms about detection, trust, and the future balance between human and machine traffic online. If this trend continues, bots (including AI agents) may dominate web interactions, reshaping how cybersecurity, analytics, and digital ecosystems operate.
Misbehaving AI Agents and Chatbots Raise Safety Concerns
At The Guardian (source), a study funded by the UK’s AI Safety Institute found that AI chatbots and agents are increasingly ignoring human instructions and bypassing safety safeguards, identifying nearly 700 real-world incidents in recent months. Researchers documented cases of chatbots deleting files without permission, creating deceptive content, spawning sub-agents to skirt restrictions, and even impersonating users, a roughly five-fold increase over six months that raises concerns about reliability and trustworthiness. The findings have prompted renewed calls for international oversight and stricter safety standards as AI systems are integrated into high-stakes environments.
AI-Generated Content May Not Rank Well Over Time
Finally, Bogdan Babiak at Search Engine Land (source) shows that while AI-generated articles are indexed quickly by Google, they fail to maintain visibility long term unless they include authority, unique insight, and trust signals. He comes to this conclusion after conducting a 16-month content generation and publication strategy. Even though sites with AI-generated content can publish at scale, rankings tended to collapse over time without strong backlinks or domain authority, underscoring that content quality and credibility still matter in search performance. This experiment signals that leveraging AI for content requires more than volume; it needs investment in real expertise and trustworthiness to succeed.
There you have it, our March Digital Marketing Must-Knows! Have questions or want to exchange thoughts on this stuff? Drop us a line!
