← Previous
This is the first edition
"Go around!" I called it out as I pressed the throttle to the firewall and sidestepped right.
I was on final approach into a rural airport that almost never sees other traffic. But someone else had the same idea, coming from the other direction. No radio call. No warning. Just a bright white landing light tracking straight at me. An instinct fired before I had time to think.
When it doesn't look right, go around and try again.
Pilots train for that scenario regularly. Not because it happens often, but because when it does, there's no time to deliberate. The training short-circuits indecision. You already know what to do. You just do it.
That's exactly what a Google Core Update feels like. The March 2026 update dropped this week with SERP volatility at historic highs. Some site owners froze. Others just executed the procedure they'd already been drilling. The difference wasn't luck. It was whether they'd been building the right habits before the unexpected traffic showed up.
Here's what I'm watching — and what I'd do about it.
This Week's Finds
-
Story 1
March 2026 Core Update: SERP Volatility at Historic Levels
ALM Corp ↗
SEMrush Sensor hit 9.5 this week — one of the highest volatility readings it has ever logged, cutting across every industry.
Google's message is clear: topical authority carries real weight now. If your site covers everything from digital marketing to kitchen renovations to crypto, that wide net is coming up empty. The update isn't punishing broad sites because breadth is bad. It's rewarding depth because depth signals genuine expertise. Your content strategy needs a center of gravity, not a shotgun spread.
-
Story 2
AI Overviews Killed CTR by 61%. Publishers Are Bracing.
Dataslayer ↗
Zero-click searches are now 58% of all Google queries. Publisher traffic from Google dropped by a third this year. One in three publishers is now considering blocking AI Overviews from indexing their content.
That's understandable. It's also mostly useless. The content that still earns clicks is content no AI Overview can replicate: proprietary data, personal experience, real opinions, analysis that goes somewhere new. Start building that moat. The alternative is competing for scraps.
-
Story 3
Meta's Andromeda Algorithm Changed How Targeting Works
Outrank ↗
Meta's Andromeda algorithm has basically made detailed audience targeting irrelevant. It now uses your ad creative to figure out who should see it — not the other way around.
Broad targeting with strong, specific creative beats narrow targeting with generic ads. If your Meta ads look like every other ad in the feed, the algorithm has nothing to work with. Also this week: Threads ads went global. A surprising number of professionals have moved there from Twitter/X. Worth testing with a small budget before your competitors figure it out.
-
Story 4
Just Culture in Aviation — and What Marketing Teams Can Learn From It
NBAA Business Aviation Insider ↗
The National Business Aviation Association published a piece on "Just Culture" in aviation. The idea: people should be able to report mistakes without fear of punishment, because hiding mistakes is more dangerous than making them. Aviation figured this out over decades after a cover-up culture was literally costing lives.
Most marketing teams run the same broken playbook. Failed campaigns get buried quietly. The same mistakes repeat. Nobody builds the institutional memory that stops the next failure. Blameless postmortems are free to implement. Most teams just won't.
-
Story 5
Email Open Rates Are Still Lying to You
Benchmark Email ↗
Apple's Mail Privacy Protection preloads tracking pixels on iOS devices whether or not anyone actually reads your email. If open rate is still your primary email KPI, you're optimizing against numbers that may be 30–40% inflated. Click-to-open rate (CTOR), reply rate, and conversion rate tell you something real.
Also: if you haven't built automated email sequences yet, here's your nudge. Properly built trigger-based sequences are converting at 2,361% better than broadcast emails. Not a typo. Build your sequences.
Deep Dive: The AI Overviews Earthquake
Sources: Dataslayer — AI Overviews CTR Impact · Press Gazette — Publisher Traffic 2026
Here's what most marketers are still sleeping on with AI Overviews. The headline number is 58% zero-click searches. But the deeper story is what that means structurally.
Publisher referral traffic from Google is down a third year over year. CTR for pages appearing under an AI Overview dropped 61%. One research firm projects publishers will see a 43% traffic decline over the next three years. That's not a blip. That's how the internet works now.
This pattern plays out repeatedly: teams that kept optimizing the old system, even while a new one was clearly winning, got left behind. Teams that stopped and asked what the new system rewards, then rebuilt around that answer — those are the ones still standing.
So what does the new system reward?
Proprietary Data and Original Research
Google can't put a zero-click summary on data that only you have. Run your own surveys. Do your own testing. Community polls count. That content is resistant to the AI Overview machine. Not immune. Resistant.
Real Perspective and Opinion
An AI Overview can summarize the facts. It can't replicate a point of view built on actual experience — the kind of content that comes from running campaigns, testing ideas, and seeing what breaks. That's what search can't commoditize.
Communities and Direct Relationships
Your email list doesn't route through Google. The IMG forum isn't subject to AI Overviews. These traffic sources are structurally different from organic search. Worth building when organic is healthy. Worth building urgently now that organic is getting hollowed out.
Key Takeaway
Audit your traffic sources this week. If more than 60% is Google organic, you're underinsured. Not panicking — underinsured. Same way a single-engine plane carries more risk than a twin. You want redundancy. Start building it.
IMG's Take: The AI Content Arms Race Is Already Eating Itself
This number should make you uncomfortable: 89% of marketers say they're using generative AI for content — brainstorming, summarizing research, writing first drafts.
And this same week, Google rolled out a Core Update with record volatility specifically targeting thin, unhelpful content. Much of it reads like the output of someone who typed a prompt and hit publish. We don't think that's a coincidence.
The internet flooded with AI content. Google saw it. Google responded. Now we're in this arms race where AI tools promise to help you produce more content faster, while Google is getting better and faster at identifying content that doesn't have a real human stake in the argument.
We're not anti-AI for content. We use it. It's genuinely useful for research, structuring ideas, and getting unstuck when you're staring at a blank page. But the marketers who are going to win aren't the ones using AI to produce more content. They're the ones using AI to produce better-researched, more specific, more personal content faster than they could before.
Bad writing is bad writing. It doesn't matter if a human or a machine produced it. If it doesn't have a perspective, a stake in the argument, lived experience behind it — Google is figuring that out. Your readers figured it out before Google did. Use AI as a research and drafting assistant. Don't use it as a ghostwriter you never edit.
Find more of this inside IMG. IMG is a private community of working marketers and SEOs — not vendors, not consultants pitching you. Practitioners who are running campaigns, testing what actually works, and sharing what they find. When something breaks overnight (which is increasingly the story with Google), that's where we figure it out together.
Join the IMG Community →
