What is it: The industry catfight over the use of pseudonyms came to light in the privacy community, but crossed over into the advertising industry. Advertisers and publishers have wondered aloud about the potential positives and dangers of a real-name-based advertising ecosystem, wedded with search. Google chairman Eric Schmidt created a stir when he stated to National Public Radio reporter Andy Carvin that he viewed Google+ as essentially an identity service with links around your friends.The controversy was further fueled when Google confirmed to a Wired.com reporter that it was planning to study the use of Google’s +1 clicks, which are pulled from Google+ profiles, as a signal that would influence “the ranking and appearance of websites in search results.”
More in Media
WTF are GEO and AEO? (and how they differ from SEO)
Future success no longer looks like being top of the blue links on Google’s index or any other search engine’s – it will center on how to ensure your content gets surfaced in AI answer engines too.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on why Google must ‘play by the same rules’ as other AI companies
Digiday spoke with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince a few days after he met with the U.K. regulator on why he believes Google will inevitably have to split its AI and search crawler.
Media Briefing: Step by step, publishers are building toward an agent-led ad business
Agentic AI-driven media trading could wipe out a lot of the problems caused by its programmatic predecessor. Namely, ad tech middlemen.