PPC Pulse: ChatGPT Ads CPMs, Ads Decoded Talks Analytics via @sejournal, @brookeosmundson

Welcome to this week’s PPC Pulse. This week’s news is a continuation of last week’s announcements about ChatGPT ads and the Google Ads Decoded podcast.

ChatGPT announced premium-priced ads with limited data. The first episode of the Ads Decoded podcast, hosted by Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads product liaison, featured Group Product Manager Eleanor Stribling to discuss Google Analytics.

Here’s what matters for advertisers and why.

ChatGPT Ads Reported To Start With $60 CPM Basis

While not directly reported from OpenAI, according to reporting from The Information, ChatGPT ads are slated to start around $60 per 1,000 impressions (CPM). This is roughly 3x higher than your typical Meta CPMs.

Despite the premium pricing from the start, advertisers won’t get the measurement tools they’re used to.

Reporting will be limited to high-level metrics like total impressions and clicks, with no visibility into conversion actions. OpenAI has indicated it may expand measurement capabilities later, but nothing is confirmed.

On the heels of last week’s announcement, ads will roll out in the coming weeks to users on ChatGPT’s Free and Go tiers. They’ll appear at the bottom of responses, only when OpenAI determines there’s a relevant product or service tied to the conversation.

Additionally, it’s been reported that initial buy-in for brands is $1 million ad spend.

Why This Matters For Advertisers

While CPM advertising is nothing new to advertisers, the lack of reporting that comes with a new platform is concerning. Especially when marketing budgets continue to get squeezed, and you’re on the hook for justifying every dollar spent.

While intent signal could prove strong with ChatGPT ads, the lack of measurement means advertisers have no way to prove that value or optimize toward it.

The high CPMs paired with minimal data categorize ChatGPT ads as more of a brand awareness play instead of a performance channel, at least initially.

Brands should be prepared to treat it like early-stage display or OTT advertising. You’re paying for attention and reach, not being able to prove ROI.

Another interesting snippet to ponder about the whole ChatGPT ads test is how they’re framing ad visibility. OpenAI already said that ads won’t influence answers. If it actually sticks to that, the only way to get placement is through genuine relevance to what someone is already trying to accomplish.

That framework is very different from how search and social ads work, and it could mean this platform stays small and selective with its advertisers, rather than becoming broadly accessible.

What PPC Professionals Are Saying

The reactions to the staggering $60 CPM starting point seem to be mixed.

Some marketers like Andrew Lolk, founder of SavvyRevenue, and Collin Slatterly, founder of Taikun Digital, aren’t necessarily phased by that number.

Slatterly stated:

“$60 CPMs for ads in ChatGPT are probably a good deal. These ads are intent based which more akin to Google search and shopping ads than Meta or TV. Someone is asking chatGPT ‘What’s the best supplement for sleep?’ which is exactly how ads on Google are.”

Lolk, in a similar sentiment, provided his initial thoughts on the cost:

“Unpopular opinion: I don’t care what CPM ChatGPT set their ads to. I care about the return on those ads. The CPM is irrelevant. Obviously, the lower CPM, the better it is for advertisers. But before we know what the return is on a $60 CPM, then I will not say it’s good or bad.”

The conversation in the comments of Lolk’s post sparked a good debate, including an opposing viewpoint from Melissa Mackey, head of paid search at Compound Growth Marketing. Mackey mentioned that because ChatGPT ads aren’t set up as a performance channel, she’s “not paying $60 CPM for something with limited data and no conversion tracking.”

On top of the discussion around cost, it appears some marketers like Harrison Jack Hepp, owner of Industrious Marketing LLC, are already being pitched from agencies that have already run ChatGPT ads, which can’t be correct since they haven’t launched yet.

Screenshot from LinkedIn by author, January 2026

First Ads Decoded Episode Focuses On Google Analytics

The first episode of Ads Decoded launched on Jan. 28, 2026, featuring Eleanor Stribling, Group Product Manager at Google Analytics. The conversation laid a few basic foundations on data strength, as well as a candid look into where GA4 is headed in the next few years.
If you’ve been frustrated with GA4 since it replaced Universal Analytics, this episode is worth your time.

Stribling didn’t dance around GA4’s rocky reputation. Instead, she acknowledged the transition challenges and spent the episode explaining where Google is taking the platform and why. The conversation covered two separate roadmaps: what’s changing in the next 12-24 months, and what Google is building toward over the next three-plus years.

Data strength came up repeatedly throughout the conversation, which makes sense given how central it is to everything Google is building. Stribling explained why it matters for AI performance and how it creates a competitive advantage for brands that get it right.

The episode also included practical guidance on setting up measurement correctly so the data you’re feeding into these systems is actually useful.

Why This Matters For Advertisers

The timing of this episode is smart. GA4 has been live for a while now, but a lot of advertisers still treat it like a downgrade from Universal Analytics. Marvin said as much during the episode that the platform felt built for developers, not marketers.

What makes this podcast episode useful isn’t just hearing Google’s vision for GA4. It’s hearing a product manager explain why certain decisions were made and what problems they’re actually trying to solve. That context helps when you’re trying to decide whether to invest time learning features that feel half-baked or waiting for something better.

The most actionable takeaway from the episode is to prioritize data strength. If your setup is messy now, the gap between what GA4 can do for you and what it could do for you is only going to widen.

What PPC Professionals Are Saying

The feedback from advertisers on LinkedIn has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s an early indicator of how much this type of communication has been asked for, and Google is providing it.

Susan Wenograd, Mixtape Digital’s senior director, paid media, commented, “Love that you’re doing this!”

John Sargent, Think VEN’s founder & managing director, showed his support, as well as asked a question about AI market share:

Congratulations Ginny! Keen to hear more in the future about AI advertising as well…Gemini going from 5% to >20% market share must be encouraging, but still early days with OpenAI sat at 60%+? How do you foresee this shifting over the next 12 months?

Alexandru Stambari, performance marketing specialist, acknowledged the good Google is doing with this information, while offering his critique on execution:

It’s good to see Google openly acknowledging that data strength is now a hard requirement for AI performance, not a “nice to have.” The focus on Analytics Advisor and transparency around Ads vs Analytics discrepancies is especially valuable for teams trying to scale automation responsibly.

That said, most of these ideas aren’t new for practitioners the real gap is still execution. Without clear implementation standards, CRM alignment, and ownership over data quality, even the best product updates risk staying at the storytelling level rather than driving measurable impact.

Theme Of The Week: Betting On What Advertisers Will Pay For

This week’s announcements are about two very different bets on what advertisers actually value.

ChatGPT is betting that access to high-intent conversations is worth $60 CPMs, even without the performance data advertisers have come to expect. They’re testing whether context and attention alone justify premium pricing when attribution and optimization are off the table.

Google is betting that transparency matters enough to build an entire podcast around it. Instead of launching another ad product or feature, they’re investing in helping advertisers understand what’s already there and what’s coming. It’s a bet that better communication and clearer explanations have value in themselves.

Both are asking advertisers to care about something that isn’t purely performance-driven. ChatGPT wants you to pay more for placement without proof. Google wants you to invest time learning about platform changes instead of just running campaigns.

More Resources:


Featured Image: beast01/Shutterstock

4 Reasons Your Google Ads Clicks Are Down & What You Can Do via @sejournal, @brookeosmundson

A click drop in your Google Ads account can feel like the floor just moved under your account.

Not because clicks are considered more of a vanity metric. But because most sites still convert just a small slice of visitors.

Shopify, believe that 2.5-3% is an average benchmark for industry leaders (although not backed with data), whereas a recent study of Shopify sites by Littedata found the average CTR was just 1.4%.

So, when click volume drops, you’re not just losing traffic. You’re losing future conversions you were counting on, and you’re handing extra shots to competitors.

The fix usually is not one magic lever. You need a quick, disciplined diagnosis:

  • Did you lose eligibility (Quality Score)?
  • Did you lose reach (impressions)?
  • Were there disruptions in performance with changes (like testing new ads)?
  • Or did you get squeezed by competition?

This article walks through the four most common causes, plus what to do next.

What Is CTR?

One of the metric definitions that hasn’t changed over the years in Google Ads is CTR.

CTR is a relatively simple formula: The number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown (clicks ÷ impressions).

While CTR is a simple calculation, this is one of the more vital metrics to help analyze performance.

Think again if you thought CTR could only be used to gauge compelling ad copy.

So, what is the purpose of CTR? Some applications of using CTR include:

  • Measuring the relevance and quality of ads.
  • Identifying the competitiveness of keywords and ads.
  • Analyzing gaps between campaign budgets and keyword bids.

When your CTR is suffering, this has a direct impact on click volume.

Now that CTR has been defined and we have use cases for the metric, you’re probably wondering, “What is a good CTR?”

A recent study from Wordstream by LocaliQ noted that the average CTR for search was 6.66% across all industries.

If your average CTR isn’t stacking up to industry averages, don’t fret! Follow these comprehensive tips to help get your CTR and click volume back up to par.

Why Is My Click Volume Decreasing?

Can’t explain the sudden dip in click performance? Here are some of the common reasons to help identify the cause.

1. Did Your Quality Score Recently Drop?

While the Quality Score metric shouldn’t be considered the “end all be all,” this often underlooked metric may be a root cause of click volume decline.

Quality Score measures these key components of your ad:

  • Expected CTR.
  • Ad relevance.
  • Landing page relevance.

Google Ads shows you a relatively detailed view of each of these areas, so you’re not left guessing what you should focus on optimizing.

Screenshot taken from a Google Ads report, January 2026

Quality Score matters because it directly impacts how often your ads are eligible to show. Not only that, but it also affects how much you’re paying per click.

Solution: Optimize Quality Score based on the “grades” Google gives you for your keywords.

Some of these fixes may be easier to implement (such as new ad copy), but if you need to optimize your landing page, that may take time and other resources.

A thorough guide to optimizing Quality Score can be found here.

Read more: Which Metrics Matter In PPC?

2. Low Impressions

If your CTR has remained steady but is seeing click volume decrease, the main issue is this: decreased impressions.

There can be multiple factors for a sudden decrease in impressions, but here are the most common:

Seasonality

If you have a seasonal product, you’re naturally going to have dips and peaks in demand.

If searches go down for your particular industry, your keywords’ impressions will also decrease.

Updated Bidding Strategy

If you’ve recently modified your bidding strategy, there could be a misalignment between your daily budget vs. your target ROAS/CPA/CPC goal.

Any significant gaps in expectations here can cause a stark decline in impressions.

For example, if you set your bidding to a $50 CPA goal for competitive keywords but typically see a $150 CPA, this will cause almost instant volatility in impressions.

The way CPA and ROAS strategies work is to throttle impressions to users who are not likely to convert to your goal.

New Negative Keywords

Like many advertisers, you’ve had to tighten up your negative keywords. This is due to Google loosening restrictions on keyword match types.

However, you may have accidentally restricted too much on negative keywords. This can result in lost impressions because of conflicting negatives.

So, what can you do to combat low impressions?

Solution: Aside from any seasonality issues, review your current bidding strategies and ensure the targets are aligned (and realistic) to your performance goals.

Additionally, comb through your negative keyword lists to identify any conflicts that are hindering your ad from showing.

Read more: Smart Bidding In Google Ads: In-Depth Guide

3. New Ads

So you’ve written shiny new ad copy and implemented it across the board. You’re excited to see your improved ad copy outperform your previous ads.

But, you’ve discovered the opposite happens, and your click volume plummets.

What gives?

Essentially, any time you make an update to your campaigns, and especially ad copy, you’ve set your campaign back into learning mode. During this time, you may expect to see volatility in performance. You may see CTR drop while Google’s algorithm learns what resonates best with users.

Obviously, this is not ideal for any advertiser. You’ve spent the time to perfect a new copy and are watching it perform worse. So, what can we learn from this scenario?

Solution: A/B test your new ads before pausing all “old” ads. This can help reduce the inevitable performance volatility of pausing all old ads and replacing them with new ones.

You can read this helpful guide, if you’re not sure where to start with A/B testing.

Read more: How To Write Better Ad Copy When Google Ads Uses AI-Assisted Features

4. Your Competitors Outbid You

Competition isn’t something that you can control. They may have a larger budget or more interesting ad copy than you. All of these items are out of your control.

What you can control is how you respond to competition.

Say your maximum CPC on a keyword is set to $5, but you notice a competitor is consistently showing above you. This most likely means that the competitor is outbidding you.

Solution: If you have the budget capacity, a simple remedy would be to be more aggressive in your bidding strategy. This can help increase impression and click volume as you show up more often.

Read more about how to use Smart Bidding effectively here.

Another example is if a competitor has a better ad copy than you. Say you’re selling a similar product, but a competitor has a promotion while you don’t. Which ad do you think will likely get more clicks?

Most likely, the promotional ad.

Solution: If you are not/cannot run a promotion, review your ad copy to identify how you can stand out from the competition.

Make sure you’re using all relevant ad extensions to help increase ad rank and real estate on the page. Consistently check the Ad Preview Tool to make sure your ad is still the most attractive on the page.

Read more: Tips For Running Competitor Campaigns In Paid Search

A Click Drop Is A Signal, Not A Verdict

When clicks fall, your job is not to panic. Your job is to isolate the reason quickly, then act with intent.
Here’s the simple mental checklist I use when I’m trying to get an account steady again:

  • If Quality Score slipped, focus on expected CTR, relevance, and landing page alignment before you touch bids.
  • If impressions dropped, sanity-check budgets, targets, and negative keyword conflicts first.
  • If new ads underperform, stop the “all at once” swap and move back to controlled testing.
  • If competitors get louder, tighten your message, improve your offer framing, and make sure assets are fully built out.

Click volume usually comes back when you stop treating it like a mystery and start treating it like a diagnosis. The goal is not “more clicks at any cost.” It’s restoring qualified visibility you can actually convert.

More Resources:


Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

Google’s SAGE Agentic AI Research: What It Means For SEO via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google published a research paper about creating a challenging dataset for training AI agents for deep research. The paper offers insights into how agentic AI deep research works, which implies insights for optimizing content.

The acronym SAGE stands for Steerable Agentic Data Generation for Deep Search with Execution Feedback.

Synthetic Question And Answer Pairs

The researchers noted that the previous state of the art AI training datasets (like Musique and HotpotQA) required no more than four reasoning steps in order to answer the questions. On the number of searches needed to answer a question, Musique averages 2.7 searches per question and HotpotQA averaged 2.1 searches. Another commonly used dataset named Natural Questions (NQ) only required an average of 1.3 searches per question.

These datasets that are used to train AI agents created a training gap for deep search tasks that required more reasoning steps and a greater number of searches. How can you train an AI agent for complex real-world deep search tasks if the AI agents haven’t been trained to tackle genuinely difficult questions.

The researchers created a system called SAGE that automatically generates high-quality, complex question-answer pairs for training AI search agents. SAGE is a “dual-agent” system where one AI writes a question and a second “search agent” AI tries to solve it, providing feedback on the complexity of the question.

  • The goal of the first AI is to write a question that’s challenging to answer and requires many reasoning steps and multiple searches to solve.
  • The goal of the second AI is try to measure if the question is answerable and calculate how difficult it is (minimum number of search steps required).

The key to SAGE is that if the second AI solves the question too easily or gets it wrong, the specific steps and documents it found (the execution trace) is fed back to the first AI. This feedback enables the first AI to identify one of four shortcuts that enable the second AI to solve the question in fewer steps.

It’s these shortcuts that provide insights into how to rank better for deep research tasks.

Four Ways That Deep Research Was Avoided

The goal of the paper was to create a set of question and answer pairs that were so difficult that it took the AI agent multiple steps to solve. The feedback showed four ways that made it less necessary for the AI agent to do additional searches to find an answer.

Four Reasons Deep Research Was Unnecessary

  1. Information Co-Location
    This is the most common shortcut, accounting for 35% of the times when deep research was not necessary. This happens when two or more pieces of information needed to answer a question are located in the same document. Instead of searching twice, the AI finds both answers in one “hop”.
  2. Multi-query Collapse
    This happened in 21% of cases. The cause is when a single, clever search query retrieves enough information from different documents to solve multiple parts of the problem at once. This “collapses” what should have been a multi-step process into a single step.
  3. Superficial Complexity
    This accounts for 13% of times when deep research was not necessary. The question looks long and complicated to a human, but a search engine (that an AI agent is using) can jump straight to the answer without needing to reason through the intermediate steps.
  4. Overly Specific Questions
    31% of the failures are questions that contain so much detail that the answer becomes obvious in the very first search, removing the need for any “deep” investigation.

The researchers found that some questions look hard but are actually relatively easy because the information is “co-located” in one document. If an agent can answer a 4-hop question in 1 hop because one website was comprehensive enough to have all the answers, that data point is considered a failure for training the agent for reasoning but it’s still something that can happen in real-life and the agent will take advantage of finding all the information on one page.

SEO Takeaways

It’s possible to gain some insights into what kinds of content satisfies the deep research. While these aren’t necessarily tactics for ranking better in agentic AI deep search, these insights do show what kinds of scenarios caused the AI agents to find all or most of the answers in one web page.

“Information Co-location” Could Be An SEO Win
The researchers found that when multiple pieces of information required to answer a question occur in the same document, it reduces the number of search steps needed. For a publisher, this means consolidating “scattered” facts into one page prevents an AI agent from having to “hop” to a competitor’s site to find the rest of the answer.

Triggering “Multi-query Collapse”
The authors identified a phenomenon where information from different documents can be retrieved using a single query. By structuring content to answer several sub-questions at once, you enable the agent to find the full solution on your page faster, effectively “short-circuiting” the long reasoning chain the agent was prepared to undertake.

Eliminating “Shortcuts” (The Reasoning Gap)
The research paper notes that the data generator fails when it accidentally creates a “shortcut” to the answer. As an SEO, your goal is to be that shortcut—providing the specific data points like calculations, dates, or names that allow the agent to reach the final answer without further exploration.

The Goal Is Still To Rank In Classic Search

For an SEO and a publisher, these shortcuts underline the value of creating a comprehensive document because it will remove the need for an AI agent from getting triggered to hop somewhere else. This doesn’t mean it will be helpful to add all the information in one page. If it makes sense for a user it may be useful to link out from one page to another page for related information.

The reason I say that is because the AI agent is conducting classic search looking for answers, so the goal remains to optimize a web page for classic search. Furthermore, in this research, the AI agent is pulling from the top three ranked web pages for each query that it’s executing. I don’t know if this is how agentic AI search works in a live environment, but this is something to consider.

In fact, one of the tests that the researchers did was conducted using the Serper API to extract search results from Google.

So when it comes to ranking in agentic AI search, consider these takeaways:

  • It may be useful to consider the importance of ranking in the top three.
  • Do optimize web pages for classic search.
  • Do not optimize web pages for AI search
  • If it’s possible to be comprehensive, remain on-topic, and rank in the top three, then do that.
  • Interlink to relevant pages to help those rank in classic search, preferably in the top three (to be safe).

It could be that agentic AI search will consider pulling from more than the top three in classic search. But it may be helpful to set the goal of ranking for the top 3 in classic search and to focus on ranking other pages that may be a part of the multi-hop deep research.

The research paper was published by Google on January 26, 2026. It’s available in PDF form:  SAGE: Steerable Agentic Data Generation for Deep Search with Execution Feedback.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Shutterstock AI Generator

Meet the Vitalists: the hardcore longevity enthusiasts who believe death is “wrong”

“Who here believes involuntary death is a good thing?” 

Nathan Cheng has been delivering similar versions of this speech over the last couple of years, so I knew what was coming. He was about to try to convince the 80 or so people in the audience that death is bad. And that defeating it should be humanity’s number one priority—quite literally, that it should come above all else in the social and political hierarchy.

“If you believe that life is good and there’s inherent moral value to life,” he told them, “it stands to reason that the ultimate logical conclusion here is that we should try to extend lifespan indefinitely.” 

Solving aging, he added, is “a problem that has an incredible moral duty for all of us to get involved in.”

It was the end of April, and the crowd—with its whoops and yeahs—certainly seemed convinced. They’d gathered at a compound in Berkeley, California, for a three-day event called the Vitalist Bay Summit. It was part of a longer, two-month residency (simply called Vitalist Bay) that hosted various events to explore tools—from drug regulation to cryonics—that might be deployed in the fight against death. One of the main goals, though, was to spread the word of Vitalism, a somewhat radical movement established by Cheng and his colleague Adam Gries a few years ago.

No relation to the lowercase vitalism of old, this Vitalism has a foundational philosophy that’s deceptively simple: to acknowledge that death is bad and life is good. The strategy for executing it, though, is far more obviously complicated: to launch a longevity revolution. 

Interest in longevity has certainly taken off in recent years, but as the Vitalists see it, it has a branding problem. The term “longevity” has been used to sell supplements with no evidence behind them, “anti-aging” has been used by clinics to sell treatments, and “transhumanism” relates to ideas that go well beyond the scope of defeating death. Not everyone in the broader longevity space shares Vitalists’ commitment to actually making death obsolete. As Gries, a longtime longevity devotee who has largely become the enthusiastic public face of Vitalism, said in an online presentation about the movement in 2024, “We needed some new word.”

“Vitalism” became a clean slate: They would start a movement to defeat death, and make that goal the driving force behind the actions of individuals, societies, and nations. Longevity could no longer be a sideshow. For Vitalism to succeed, budgets would need to change. Policy would need to change. Culture would need to change. Consider it longevity for the most hardcore adherents—a sweeping mission to which nothing short of total devotion will do.

“The idea is to change the systems and the priorities of society at the highest levels,” Gries said in the presentation.

To be clear, the effective anti-aging treatments the Vitalists are after don’t yet exist. But that’s sort of the point: They believe they could exist if Vitalists are able to spread their gospel, influence science, gain followers, get cash, and ultimately reshape government policies and priorities. 

For the past few years, Gries and Cheng have been working to recruit lobbyists, academics, biotech CEOs, high-net-worth individuals, and even politicians into the movement, and they’ve formally established a nonprofit foundation “to accelerate Vitalism.” Today, there’s a growing number of Vitalists (some paying foundation members, others more informal followers, and still others who support the cause but won’t publicly admit as much), and the foundation has started “certifying” qualifying biotech companies as Vitalist organizations. Perhaps most consequentially, Gries, Cheng, and their peers are also getting involved in shaping US state laws that make unproven, experimental treatments more accessible. They hope to be able to do the same at the national level.

Nathan Cheng being interviewed outdoors at Longevity State Conference

VITALISMFOUNDATION.ORG
Adam Gries being interviewed outdoors at Longevity State Conference

VITALISMFOUNDATION.ORG

Vitalism cofounders Nathan Cheng and Adam Gries want to launch a longevity revolution.

All this is helping Vitalists grow in prominence, if not also power. In the past, people who have spoken of living forever or making death “optional” have been dismissed by their academic colleagues. I’ve been covering the broader field of aging science for a decade, and I’ve seen scientists roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders, and turn their backs on people who have talked this way. That’s not the case for the Vitalists.  

Even the scientists who think that Vitalist ideas of defeating death are wacky, unattainable ones, with the potential to discredit their field, have shown up on stage with Vitalism’s founders, and these serious researchers provide a platform for them at more traditionally academic events.

I saw this collegiality firsthand at Vitalist Bay. Faculty members from Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley, all spoke at events. Eric Verdin, the prominent researcher who directs the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, had also planned to speak, although a scheduling clash meant he couldn’t make it in the end. “I have very different ideas in terms of what’s doable,” he told me. “But that’s part of the [longevity] movement—there’s freedom for people to say whatever they want.” 

Many other well-respected scientists attended, including representatives of ARPA-H, the US federal agency for health research and breakthrough technologies. And as I left for a different event on longevity in Washington, DC, just after the Vitalist Bay Summit, a sizable group of Vitalist Bay attendees headed that way too, to make the case for longevity to US lawmakers.

The Vitalists feel that momentum is building, not just for the science of aging and the development of lifespan-extending therapies, but for the acceptance of their philosophy that defeating death should be humanity’s top concern

This, of course, sparks some pretty profound questions. What would a society without death look like—and would we even want it? After all, death has become an important part of human culture the world over. And even if Vitalists aren’t destined to realize their lofty goal, their growing influence could still have implications for us all. As they run more labs and companies, and insert themselves into the making of laws and policy, perhaps they will discover treatments that really do slow or even reverse aging. In the meantime, though, some ethicists are concerned that experimental and unproven medicines—including potentially dangerous ones—are becoming more accessible, in some cases with little to no oversight. 

Gries, ultimately, has a different view of the ethics here. He thinks that being “okay with death” is what disqualifies a person from being considered ethical. “Death is just wrong,” he says. “It’s not just wrong for some people. It’s wrong for all people.”

The birth of a revolution

When I arrived at the Vitalist Bay Summit on April 25, I noticed that the venue was equipped with everything a longevity enthusiast might need: napping rooms, a DEXA body-composition scanner, a sauna in a bus, and, for those so inclined, 24-hour karaoke. 

I was told that around 300 people had signed up for that day’s events, which was more than had attended the previous week. That might have been because arguably the world’s most famous longevity enthusiast, Bryan Johnson, was about to make an appearance. (If you’re curious to know more about what Johnson was doing there, you can read about our conversation here.) 

The key to Vitalism has always been that “death is humanity’s core problem, and aging its primary agent,” cofounder Adam Gries told me. “So it was, and so it has continued, as it was foretold.” 

But Gries, another man in his 40s who doesn’t want to die, was the first to address the audience that day. Athletic and energetic, he bounded across a stage wearing bright yellow shorts and a long-sleeved shirt imploring people to “Choose Life: VITALISM.”

Gries is a tech entrepreneur who describes himself as a self-taught software engineer who’s “good at virality.” He’s been building companies since he was in college in the 2000s, and grew his personal wealth by selling them.

As with many other devotees to the cause, his deep interest in life extension was sparked by Aubrey de Grey, a controversial researcher with an iconic long beard and matching ponytail. He’s known widely both for his optimistic views about “defeating aging” and for having reportedly made sexual comments to two longevity entrepreneurs. (In an email, de Grey said he’s “never disputed” one of these remarks but denied having made the other. “My continued standing within the longevity community speaks for itself,” he added.) 

In an influential 2005 TED Talk (which has over 4.8 million views), de Grey predicted that people would live to 1,000 and spoke of the possibility of new technologies that would continue to stave off death, allowing some to avoid it indefinitely. (In a podcast recorded last year, Cheng described a recording of this talk as “the OG longevity-pilling YouTube video.”)

Aubrey de Grey
Many Vitalists have been influenced by controversial longevity researcher Aubrey de Grey. Cheng called his 2005 TED Talk “the OG longevity-pilling YouTube video.”
PETER SEARLE/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX

“It was kind of evident to me that life is great,” says Gries. “So I’m kind of like, why would I not want to live?”

A second turning point for Gries came during the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic, when he essentially bet against companies that he thought would collapse. “I made this 50 [fold] return,” he says. “It was kind of like living through The Big Short.”

Gries and his wife fled from San Francisco to Israel, where he grew up, and later traveled to Taiwan, where he’d obtained a “golden visa” and which was, at the time, one of only two countries that had not reported a single case of covid. His growing wealth afforded him the opportunity to take time from work and think about the purpose of life. “My answer was: Life is the purpose of life,” he says. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to experience the “journey of decrepitude” that aging often involves.

So he decided to dedicate himself to the longevity cause. He went about looking up others who seemed as invested as he was. In 2021 his search led him to Cheng, a Chinese-Canadian entrepreneur based in Toronto. He had dropped out of a physics PhD a few years earlier after experiencing what he describes on his website as “a massive existential crisis” and shifted his focus to “radical longevity.” (Cheng did not respond to email requests for an interview.)

The pair “hit it off immediately,” says Gries, and they spent the following two years trying to figure out what they could do. The solution they finally settled on: revolution.

After all, Gries reasons, that’s how significant religious and social movements have happened in the past. He says they sought inspiration from the French and American Revolutions, among others. The idea was to start with some kind of “enlightenment,” and with a “hardcore group,” to pursue significant social change with global ramifications. 

“We were convinced that without a revolution,” Gries says, “we were as good as dead.” 

A home for believers

Early on, they wrote a Vitalist declaration, a white paper that lists five core statements for believers:

  1. Life and health are good. Death is humanity’s core problem, and aging its primary agent.
  2. Aging causes immense suffering, and obviating aging is scientifically plausible.
  3. Humanity should apply the necessary resources to reach freedom from aging as soon as possible.
  4. I will work on or support others to work on reaching unlimited healthy human lifespan.
  5. I will carry the message against aging and death.

While it’s not an explicit part of the manifesto, it was important to them to think about it as a moral philosophy as well as a movement. As Cheng said at the time, morality “guides most of the actions of our lives.” The same should be true of Vitalism, he suggested. 

Gries has echoed this idea. The belief that “death is morally bad” is necessary to encourage behavior change, he told me in 2024. It is a moral drive, or moral purpose, that pushes people to do difficult things, he added.

Revolution, after all, is difficult. And to succeed—to “get unlimited great health to the top of the priority list,” as Gries says—the movement would need to infiltrate the government and shape policy decisions and national budgets. The Apollo program got people to the moon with less than 1% of US GDP; imagine, Gries asks, what we could do to human longevity with a mere 1% of GDP?

It makes sense, then, that Gries and Cheng launched Vitalism in 2023 at Zuzalu, a “pop-up city” in Montenegro that provided a two-month home for like-minded longevity enthusiasts. The gathering was in some ways a loose prototype for what they wanted to accomplish. Cheng spoke there of how they wanted to persuade 10,000 or so Vitalists to move to Rhode Island. Not only was it close to the biotech hub of Boston, but they believed it had a small enough population for an influx of new voters sharing their philosophy to influence local and state elections. “Five to ten thousand people—that’s all we need,” he said. Or if not Rhode Island, another small-ish US state, where they could still change state policy from the inside. 

The ultimate goal was to recruit Vitalists to help them establish a “longevity state”—a recognized jurisdiction that “prioritizes doing something about aging,” Cheng said, perhaps by loosening regulations on clinical trials or supporting biohacking.

Bryan Johnson sitting cross-legged at home
Bryan Johnson, who is perhaps the world’s most famous longevity enthusiast, spoke at Vitalist Bay and is trying to start a Don’t Die religion.
AGATON STROM/REDUX PICTURES

This idea is popular among many vocal members of the Vitalism community. It borrows from the concept of the “network state” developed by former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, defined as a new city or country that runs on cryptocurrency; focuses on a goal, in this case extending human lifespan; and “eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states.” 

Some people not interested in dying have made progress toward realizing such a domain. Following the success of Zuzalu, one of the event’s organizers, Laurence Ion, a young cryptocurrency investor and self-proclaimed Vitalist, joined a fellow longevity enthusiast named Niklas Anzinger to organize a sequel in Próspera, the private “special economic zone” on the Honduran island of Roatán. They called their “pop-up city” Vitalia.

I visited shortly after it launched in January 2024. The goal was to create a low-regulation biotech hub to fast-track the development of anti-aging drugs, though the “city” was more like a gated resort that hosted talks from a mix of respected academics, biohackers, biotech CEOs, and straight-up eugenicists. There was a strong sense of community—many attendees were living with or near each other, after all. A huge canvas where attendees could leave notes included missives like “Don’t die,” “I love you,” and “Meet technoradicals building the future!” 

But Vitalia was short-lived, with events ending by the start of March 2024. And while many of the vibes were similar to what I’d later see at Vitalist Bay, the temporary nature of Vitalia didn’t quite match the ambition of Gries and Cheng. 

Patri Friedman, a 49-year-old libertarian and grandson of the economist Milton Friedman who says he attended Zuzalu, Vitalia, and Vitalist Bay, envisions something potentially even bolder. He’s the founder of the Seasteading Institute, which has the goal of “building startup communities that float on the ocean with any measure of political autonomy” and has received funding and support from the billionaire Peter Thiel. Friedman also founded Pronomos Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in projects focused on “building the cities of tomorrow.” 

His company is exploring various types of potential network states, but he says he’s found that medical tourism—and, specifically, a hunger for life extension—dominates the field. “People do not want this ‘10 years and a billion dollars to pass a drug’ thing with the FDA,” says Friedman. (While he doesn’t call himself a Vitalist, partly because he’s “almost never going to agree with” any kind of decree, Friedman holds what you might consider similarly staunch sentiments about death, which he referred to as “murder by omission.” When I asked him if he has a target age he’d like to reach, he told me he found the question “mind-bogglingly strange” and “insane.” “How could you possibly be like: Yes, please murder me at this time?” he replied. “I can always fucking shoot myself in the head—I don’t need anybody’s help.”) 

But even as Vitalists and those aligned with their beliefs embrace longevity states, Gries and Cheng are reassessing their former ambitions. The network-state approach has limits, Gries tells me. And encouraging thousands of people to move to Rhode Island wasn’t as straightforward as they’d hoped it might be.

Not because he can’t find tens of thousands of Vitalists, Gries stresses—but most of them are unwilling to move their lives for the sake of influencing the policy of another state. He compares Vitalism to a startup, with a longevity state as its product. For the time being, at least, there isn’t enough consumer appetite for that product, he says. 

The past year shows that it may in fact be easier to lobby legislators in states that are already friendly to deregulation. Anzinger and a lobbying group called the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI) were integral to making Montana the first US hub for experimental medical treatments, with a new law to allow clinics to sell experimental therapies once they have been through preliminary safety tests (which don’t reveal whether a drug actually works). But Gries and his Vitalist colleagues also played a role—“providing feedback, talking to lawmakers … brainstorming [and] suggesting ideas,” Gries says. 

The Vitalist crew has been in conversation with lawmakers in New Hampshire, too. In an email in December, Gries and Cheng claimed they’d “helped to get right-to-try laws passed” in the state—an apparent reference to the recent expansion of a law to make more unapproved treatments accessible to people with terminal illnesses. Meanwhile, three other bills that expand access even further are under consideration. 

Ultimately, Gries stresses, Vitalism is “agnostic to the fixing strategies” that will help them meet their goals. There is, though, at least one strategy he’s steadfast about: building influence.

Only the hardcore 

To trigger a revolution, the Vitalists may need to recruit only around 3% or 4% of “society” to their movement, Gries believes. (Granted, that does still mean hundreds of millions of people.) “If you want people to take action, you need to focus on a small number of very high-leverage people,” he tells me. 

That, perhaps unsurprisingly, includes wealthy individuals with “a net worth of $10 million or above,” he says. He wants to understand why (with some high-profile exceptions, including Thiel, who has been investing in longevity-related companies and foundations for decades) most uber-wealthy people don’t invest in the field—and how he might persuade them to do so. He won’t reveal the names of anyone he’s having conversations with. 

These “high-leverage” people might also include, Gries says, well-respected academics, leaders of influential think tanks, politicians and policymakers, and others who work in government agencies.

A revolution needs to find its foot soldiers. And at the most basic level, that will mean boosting the visibility of the Vitalism brand—partly through events like Vitalist Bay, but also by encouraging others, particularly in the biotech space, to sign on. Cheng talks of putting out a “bat signal” for like-minded people, and he and Gries say that Vitalism has brought together people who have gone on to collaborate or form companies. 

There’s also their nonprofit Vitalism International Foundation, whose supporters can opt to become “mobilized Vitalists” with monthly payments of $29 or more, depending on their level of commitment. In addition, the foundation works with longevity biotech companies to recognize those that are “aligned” with its goals as officially certified Vitalist organizations. “Designation may be revoked if an organization adopts apologetic narratives that accept aging or death,” according to the website. At the time of writing, that site lists 16 certified Vitalist organizations, including cryopreservation companies, a longevity clinic, and several research companies. 

One of them is Shift Bioscience, a company using CRISPR and aging clocks—which attempt to measure biological age—to identify genes that might play a significant role in the aging process and potentially reverse it. It says it has found a single gene that can rejuvenate multiple types of cells

Shift cofounder Daniel Ives, who holds degrees in mitochondrial and computational biology, tells me he was also won over to the longevity cause by de Grey’s 2005 TED Talk. He now has a countdown on his computer: “It’s my days till death,” he says—around 22,000 days left. “I’m using that to keep myself focused.” 

Ives calls himself the “Vitalist CEO” of Shift Bioscience. He thinks the label is important first as a way for like-minded people to find and support each other, grow their movement, and make the quest for longevity mainstream. Second, he says, it provides a way to appeal to “hardcore” lifespan extensionists, given that others in the wellness and cosmetics industry have adopted the term “longevity” without truly applying themselves to finding rejuvenation therapies. He refers to unnamed companies and individuals who claim that drinking juices, for example, can reverse aging by five years or so.

“You don’t have to convince the mainstream,” says ARPA-H science and engineering advisor Mark Hamalainen. Though kind of a terrible example, he notes, Stalinism started small. “Sometimes you just have to convince the right people.”

“Somebody will make these claims and basically throw legitimate science under the bus,” he says. He doesn’t want spurious claims made on social media to get lumped in with the company’s serious molecular biology. Shift’s head of machine learning, Lucas Paulo de Lima Camillo, was recently awarded a $10,000 prize by the well-respected Biomarkers of Aging Consortium for an aging clock he developed. 

Another out-and-proud Vitalist CEO is Anar Isman, the cofounder of AgelessRx, a telehealth provider that offers prescriptions for purported longevity drugs—and a certified Vitalist organization. (Isman, who is in his early 40s, used to work at a hedge fund but was inspired to join the longevity field by—you guessed it—de Grey.)

During a panel session at Vitalist Bay, he stressed that he too saw longevity as a movement—and a revolution—rather than an industry. But he also claimed his company wasn’t doing too badly commercially. “We’ve had a lot of demand,” he said. “We’ve got $60 million plus in annual revenue.”

Many of his customers come to the site looking for treatments for specific ailments, he tells me. He views each as an opportunity to “evangelize” his views on “radical life extension.” “I don’t see a difference between … dying tomorrow or dying in 30 years,” he says. He wants to live “at least 100 more” years.

CHRIS LABROOY

Vitalism, though, isn’t just appealing to commercial researchers. Mark Hamalainen, a 41-year-old science and engineering advisor at ARPA-H, describes himself as a Vitalist. He says he “kind of got roped into” Vitalism because he also works with Cheng—they founded the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, which supports new entrants to the field through mentoring programs. “I kind of view it as a more appealing rebranding of some of the less radical aspects of transhumanism,” he says. Transhumanism—the position that we can use technologies to enhance humans beyond the current limits of biology—covers a broad terrain, but “Vitalism is like: Can we just solve this death thing first? It’s a philosophy that’s easy to get behind.”

In government, he works with individuals like Jean Hébert, a former professor of genetics and neuroscience who has investigated the possibility of rejuvenating the brain by gradually replacing parts of it; Hébert has said that “[his] mission is to beat aging.” He spoke at Zuzalu and Vitalist Bay. 

Andrew Brack, who serves as the program manager for proactive health at ARPA-H, was at Vitalist Bay, too. Both Brack and Hébert oversee healthy federal budgets—Hébert’s brain replacement project was granted $110 million in 2024, for example.

Neither Hébert nor Brack has publicly described himself as a Vitalist, and Hébert wouldn’t agree to speak to me without the approval of ARPA-H’s press office, which didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview with him or Brack. Brack did not respond to direct requests for an interview.

Gries says he thinks that “many people at [the US Department of Health and Human Services], including all agencies, have a longevity-positive view and probably agree with a lot of the ideas Vitalism stands for.” And he is hoping to help secure federal positions for others who are similarly aligned with his philosophy. On both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve last year, Gries and Cheng sent fundraising emails describing an “outreach effort” to find applicants for six open government positions that, together, would control billions of dollars in federal funding. “Qualified, mission-aligned candidates we’d love to support do exist, but they need to be found and encouraged to apply,” the pair wrote in the second email. “We’re starting a systematic search to reach, screen, and support the best candidates.” 

Hamalainen supports Gries’s plan to target high-leverage individuals. “You don’t have to convince the mainstream,” he says. Though “kind of a terrible example,” Hamalainen notes, Stalinism started small. “Sometimes you just have to convince the right people.”

One of the “right” people may be the man who inspired Gries, Hamalainen, Ives, Isman, and so many others to pursue longevity in the first place: de Grey. He’s now a paid-up Vitalist and even spoke at Vitalist Bay. Having been in the field for over 20 years, de Grey tells me, he’s seen various terms fall in and out of favor. Those terms now have “baggage that gets in the way,” he says. “Sometimes it’s useful to have a new term.”

The sometimes quiet (sometimes powerful, sometimes influential) Vitalists

Though one of the five principles of Vitalism is a promise to “carry the message,” some people who agree with its ideas are reluctant to go public, including some signed-up Vitalists. I’ve asked Gries multiple times over several years, but he won’t reveal how many Vitalists there are, let alone who makes up the membership.

Even some of the founders of Vitalism don’t want to be public about it. Around 30 people were involved in developing the movement, Gries says—but only 22 are named as contributors to the Vitalism white paper (with Gries as its author), including Cheng, Vitalia’s Ion, and ARPA-H’s Hamalainen. Gries won’t reveal the names of the others. He acknowledges that some people just don’t like to publicly affiliate with any organization. That’s certainly what I’ve found when I’ve asked members of the longevity community if they’re Vitalists. Many said they agreed with the Vitalist declaration, and that they liked and supported what Gries was doing. But they didn’t want the label.

Some people worry that associating with a belief system that sounds a bit religious—even cult-like, some say—won’t do the cause any favors. Others have a problem with the specific wording of the declaration.

For instance, Anzinger—the other Vitalia founder—won’t call himself a Vitalist. He says he respects the mission, but that the declaration is “a bit poetic” for his liking.

And Dylan Livingston, CEO of A4LI and arguably one of the most influential longevity enthusiasts out there, won’t describe himself as a Vitalist either.

Many other longevity biotech CEOs also shy away from the label—including Emil Kendziorra, who runs the human cryopreservation company Tomorrow Bio, even though that’s a certified Vitalist organization. Kendziorra says he agrees with most of the Vitalist declaration but thinks it is too “absolutist.” He also doesn’t want to imply that the pursuit of longevity should be positioned above war, hunger, and other humanitarian issues. (Gries has heard this argument before, and counters that both the vast spending on health care for people in the last years of their life and the use of lockdown strategies during the covid pandemic suggest that, deep down, lifespan extension is “society’s revealed preference.”)

Still, because Kendziorra agrees with almost everything in the declaration, he believes that “pushing it forward” and bringing more attention to the field by labeling his company a Vitalist organization is a good thing. “It’s to support other people who want to move the world in that direction,” he says. (He also offered Vitalist Bay attendees a discount on his cryopreservation services.) 

“There’s a lot of closeted scientists working in our field, and they get really excited about lifespans increasing,” explains Ives of Shift Bioscience. “But you’ll get people who’ll accuse you of being a lunatic that wants to be immortal.” He claims that people who represent biotech companies tell him “all the time” that they are secretly longevity companies but avoid using the term because they don’t want funders or collaborators to be “put off.”

Ultimately, it may not really matter how much people adopt the Vitalist label as long as the ideas break through. “It’s pretty simple. [The Vitalist declaration] has five points—if you agree with the five points, you are a Vitalist,” says Hamalainen. “You don’t have to be public about it.” He says he’s spoken to others about “coming out of the closet” and that it’s been going pretty well. 

Gries puts it more bluntly: “If you agree with the Vitalist declaration, you are a Vitalist.” 

And he hints that there are now many people in powerful positions—including in the Trump administration—who share his views, even if they don’t openly identify as Vitalists. 

For Gries, this includes Jim O’Neill, the deputy secretary of health and human services, whom I profiled a few months after he became Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s number two. (More recently, O’Neill was temporarily put in charge of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

Jim O'Neill sworn in by Robert F Kennedy Jr as Deputy Secretary of the HHS
Jim O’Neill, the deputy secretary of health and human services, is one of the highest-profile longevity enthusiasts serving in government. Gries says, “It seems that now there is the most pro-longevity administration in American history.” 
AMY ROSSETTI/DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES VIA AP

O’Neill has long been interested in both longevity and the idea of creating new jurisdictions. Until March 2024, he served on the board of directors of Friedman’s Seasteading Institute. He also served as CEO of the SENS Research Foundation, a longevity organization founded by de Grey, between 2019 and 2021, and he represented Thiel as a board member there for many years. Many people in the longevity community say they know him personally, or have at least met him. (Tristan Roberts, a biohacker who used to work with a biotech company operating in Próspera, tells me he served O’Neill gin when he visited his Burning Man camp, which he describes as a “technology gay camp from San Francisco and New York.” Hamalainen also recalls meeting O’Neill at Burning Man, at a “techy, futurist” camp.) (Neither O’Neill nor representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services responded to a request to comment about this.)

O’Neill’s views are arguably becoming less fringe in DC these days. The day after the Vitalist Bay Summit, A4LI was hosting its own summit in the capital with the goal of “bringing together leaders, advocates, and innovators from around the globe to advance legislative initiatives that promote a healthier human lifespan.” I recognized lots of Vitalist Bay attendees there, albeit in more formal attire.

The DC event took place over three days in late April. The first two involved talks by longevity enthusiasts across the spectrum, including scientists, lawyers, and biotech CEOs. Vitalia’s Anzinger spoke about the success he’d had in Próspera, and ARPA-H’s Brack talked about work his agency was doing. (Hamalainen was also there, although he said he was not representing ARPA-H.)

But the third day was different and made me think Gries may be right about Vitalism’s growing reach. It began with a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill, during which Representative Gus Bilirakis, a Republican from Florida, asked, “Who doesn’t want to live longer, right?” As he explained, “Longevity science … directly aligns with the goals of the Make America Healthy Again movement.”

“There’s a lot of closeted scientists working in our field, and they get really excited about lifespans increasing,” says Daniel Ives of Shift Bioscience. “But you’ll get people who’ll accuse you of being a lunatic that wants to be immortal.”

Bilirakis and Representative Paul Tonko, a New York Democrat, were followed by Mehmet Oz, the former TV doctor who now leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; he opened with typical MAHA talking points about chronic disease and said US citizens have a “patriotic duty” to stay healthy to keep medical costs down. The audience was enthralled as Oz talked about senescent cells, the zombie-like aged cells that are thought to be responsible for some age-related damage to organs and tissues. (The offices of Bilirakis and Tonko did not respond to a request for comment; neither did the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.)

And while none of the speakers went anywhere near the concept of radical life extension, the Vitalists in the audience were suitably encouraged. 

Gries is too: “It seems that now there is the most pro-longevity administration in American history.” 

The fate of “immortality quests”

Whether or not Vitalism starts a revolution, it will almost always be controversial in some quarters. While believers see an auspicious future, others are far less certain of the benefits of a world designed to defeat death.

Gries and Cheng often make the case for deregulation in their presentations. But ethicists—and even some members of the longevity community—point out that this comes with risks. Some question whether it is ever ethical to sell a “treatment” without some idea of how likely it is to benefit the person buying and taking it. Enthusiasts counter with arguments about bodily autonomy. And they hope Montana is just the start. 

Then there’s the bigger picture. Is it really that great not to die … ever? Some ethicists argue that for many cultures, death is what gives meaning to life. 

Sergio Imparato, a moral philosopher and medical ethicist at Harvard University, believes that death itself has important moral meaning. We know our lives will end, and our actions have value precisely because our time is limited, he says. Imparato is concerned that Vitalists are ultimately seeking to change what it means to be human—a decision that should involve all members of society. 

Alberto Giubilini, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, agrees. “Death is a defining feature of humanity,” he says. “Our psychology, our cultures, our rituals, our societies, are built around the idea of coping with death … it’s part of human nature.”

CHRIS LABROOY

Imparato’s family is from Naples, Italy, where poor residents were once laid to rest in shared burial sites, with no headstones to identify them. He tells me how the locals came to visit, clean, and even “adopt” the skulls as family members. It became a weekly ritual for members of the community, including his grandmother, who was a young girl at the time. “It speaks to what I consider the cultural relevance of death,” he says. “It’s the perfect counterpoint to … the Vitalist conception of life.”  

Gries seems aware of the stigma around such “immortality quests,” as Imparato calls them. In his presentations, Gries shares lists of words that Vitalists should try to avoid—like “eternity,” “radical,” and “forever,” as well as any religious terms. 

He also appears to be dropping, at least publicly, the idea that Vitalism is a “moral” movement. Morality was “never part of the Vitalist declaration,” Gries told me in September. When I asked him why he had changed his position on this, he dismissed the question. “Our point … was always that death is humanity’s core problem, and aging its primary agent,” he told me. “So it was, and so it has continued, as it was foretold.” 

But despite these attempts to tweak and control the narrative, Vitalism appears to be opening the door to an incredibly wide range of sentiments in longevity science. A decade ago, I don’t think there would have been any way that the views espoused by Gries, Anzinger, and others who support Vitalist sentiments would have been accepted by the scientific establishment. After all, these are people who publicly state they hope to live indefinitely and who have no training in the science of aging, and who are open about their aims to find ways to evade the restrictions set forth by regulatory agencies like the FDA—all factors that might have rendered them outcasts not that long ago.

But Gries and peers had success in Montana. Influential scientists and policymakers attend Vitalism events, and Vitalists are featured regularly at more mainstream longevity events. Last year’s Aging Research and Drug Discovery (ARDD) conference in Copenhagen—widely recognized as the most important meeting in aging science—was sponsored in part by Anzinger’s new Próspera venture, Infinita City, as well as by several organizations that are either certified Vitalist or led by Vitalists.

“I was thinking that maybe what I was doing was very fringe or out there,” Anzinger, the non-Vitalist supporter of Vitalism, admits. “But no—I feel … loads of support.”

There was certainly an air of optimism at the Vitalist Bay Summit in Berkeley. Gries’s positivity is infectious. “All the people who want a fun and awesome surprise gift, come on over!” he called out early on the first day. “Raise your voice if you’re excited!” The audience whooped in response. He then proceeded to tell everyone, Oprah Winfrey–style, that they were all getting a free continuous glucose monitor. “You get a CGM! You get a CGM!” Plenty of attendees actually attached them to their arms on the spot.

Every revolution has to start somewhere, right?

This piece has been updated to clarify a quote from Mark Hamalainen.

How the grid can ride out winter storms

The eastern half of the US saw a monster snowstorm over the weekend. The good news is the grid has largely been able to keep up with the freezing temperatures and increased demand. But there were some signs of strain, particularly for fossil-fuel plants.

One analysis found that PJM, the nation’s largest grid operator, saw significant unplanned outages in plants that run on natural gas and coal. Historically, these facilities can struggle in extreme winter weather.

Much of the country continues to face record-low temperatures, and the possibility is looming for even more snow this weekend. What lessons can we take from this storm, and how might we shore up the grid to cope with extreme weather?

Living in New Jersey, I have the honor of being one of the roughly 67 million Americans covered by the PJM Interconnection.

So I was in the thick of things this weekend, when PJM saw unplanned outages of over 20 gigawatts on Sunday during the height of the storm. (That’s about 16% of the grid’s demand that afternoon.) Other plants were able to make up the difference, and thankfully, the power didn’t go out in my area. But that’s a lot of capacity offline.

Typically, the grid operator doesn’t announce details about why an outage occurs until later. But analysts at Energy Innovation, a policy and research firm specializing in energy and climate, went digging. By examining publicly available grid mix data (a breakdown of what types of power plants are supplying the grid), the team came to a big conclusion: Fossil fuels failed during the storm.

The analysts found that gas-fired power plants were producing about 10 gigawatts less power on Sunday than the peak demand on Saturday, even while electricity prices were high. Coal- and oil-burning plants were down too. Because these plants weren’t operating, even when high prices would make it quite lucrative, they were likely a significant part of the problem, says Michelle Solomon, a manager in the electricity program at Energy Innovation.

PJM plans to share more details about the outages at an upcoming committee meeting once the cold snap passes, Dan Lockwood, a PJM spokesperson, told me via email.

Fossil-fuel plants can see reliability challenges during winter: When temperatures drop, pressures in natural-gas lines fall too, which can lead to issues for fuel supply. Freezing temperatures can throw compression stations and other mechanical equipment offline and even freeze piles of coal.

One of the starkest examples came in 2021, when Texas faced freezing temperatures that took many power plants offline and threw the grid into chaos. Many homes lost power for days, and at least 246 people died during that storm.

Texas fared much better this time around. After 2021, the state shored up its grid, adding winter weatherization for power plants and transmission systems. Texas has also seen a huge flood of batteries come online, which has greatly helped the grid during winter demand peaks, especially in the early mornings. Texas was also simply lucky that this storm was less severe there, as one expert told Inside Climate News this week.

Here on the East Coast, we’re not out of the woods yet. The snow has stopped falling, but grids are still facing high electricity demand because of freezing temperatures. (I’ve certainly been living under my heated blanket these last few days.)

PJM could see a peak power demand of 130 gigawatts for seven straight days, a winter streak that the local grid has never experienced, according to an update to the utility’s site on Tuesday morning.

The US Department of Energy issued emergency orders to several grid operators, including PJM, that allow power plants to run while basically ignoring emissions regulations. The department also issued orders allowing several grids to tell data centers and other facilities to begin using backup generators. (This is good news for reliability but bad news for clean air and the climate, since these power sources are often incredibly emissions-intensive.)

We here on the East Coast could learn a thing or two from Texas so we don’t need to resort to these polluting emergency measures to keep the lights on. More energy storage could be a major help in future winter storms, lending flexibility to the grid to help ride out the worst times, Solomon says. Getting offshore wind online could also help, since those facilities typically produce reliable power in the winter. 

No one energy source will solve the massive challenge of building and maintaining a resilient grid. But as we face the continued threat of extreme storms, renewables might actually help us weather them. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

The Download: inside the Vitalism movement, and why AI’s “memory” is a privacy problem

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Meet the Vitalists: the hardcore longevity enthusiasts who believe death is “wrong”

Last April, an excited crowd gathered at a compound in Berkeley, California, for a three-day event called the Vitalist Bay Summit. It was part of a longer, two-month residency that hosted various events to explore tools—from drug regulation to cryonics—that might be deployed in the fight against death.

One of the main goals, though, was to spread the word of Vitalism, a somewhat radical movement established by Nathan Cheng and his colleague Adam Gries a few years ago. Consider it longevity for the most hardcore adherents—a sweeping mission to which nothing short of total devotion will do.

Although interest in longevity has certainly taken off in recent years, not everyone in the broader longevity space shares Vitalists’ commitment to actually making death obsolete. And the Vitalists feel that momentum is building, not just for the science of aging and the development of lifespan-extending therapies, but for the acceptance of their philosophy that defeating death should be humanity’s top concern. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

This is the latest in our Big Story series, the home for MIT Technology Review’s most important, ambitious reporting. You can read the rest of the series here

What AI “remembers” about you is privacy’s next frontier

—Miranda Bogen, director of the AI Governance Lab at the Center for Democracy & Technology, & Ruchika Joshi, fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology specializing in AI safety and governance

The ability to remember you and your preferences is rapidly becoming a big selling point for AI chatbots and agents.

Personalized, interactive AI systems are built to act on our behalf, maintain context across conversations, and improve our ability to carry out all sorts of tasks, from booking travel to filing taxes.

But their ability to store and retrieve increasingly intimate details about their users over time introduces alarming, and all-too-familiar, privacy vulnerabilities––many of which have loomed since “big data” first teased the power of spotting and acting on user patterns. Worse, AI agents now appear poised to plow through whatever safeguards had been adopted to avoid those vulnerabilities. So what can developers do to fix this problem? Read the full story.

How the grid can ride out winter storms

The eastern half of the US saw a monster snowstorm over the weekend. The good news is the grid has largely been able to keep up with the freezing temperatures and increased demand. But there were some signs of strain, particularly for fossil-fuel plants.

One analysis found that PJM, the nation’s largest grid operator, saw significant unplanned outages in plants that run on natural gas and coal. Historically, these facilities can struggle in extreme winter weather.

Much of the country continues to face record-low temperatures, and the possibility is looming for even more snow this weekend. What lessons can we take from this storm, and how might we shore up the grid to cope with extreme weather? Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Telegram has been flooded with deepfake nudes 
Millions of users are creating and sharing falsified images in dedicated channels. (The Guardian)

2 China has executed 11 people linked to Myanmar scam centers
The members of the “Ming family criminal gang” caused the death of at least 14 Chinese citizens. (Bloomberg $)
+ Inside a romance scam compound—and how people get tricked into being there. (MIT Technology Review)

3 This viral personal AI assistant is a major privacy concern
Security researchers are sounding the alarm on Moltbot, formerly known as Clawdbot. (The Register)
+ It requires a great deal more technical know-how than most agentic bots. (TechCrunch)

4 OpenAI has a plan to keep bots off its future social network
It’s putting its faith in biometric “proof of personhood” promised by the likes of World’s eyeball-scanning orb. (Forbes)
+ We reported on how World recruited its first half a million test users back in 2022. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Here’s just some of the technologies ICE is deploying
From facial recognition to digital forensics. (WP $)
+ Agents are also using Palantir’s AI to sift through tip-offs. (Wired $)

6 Tesla is axing its Model S and Model X cars 🚗
Its Fremont factory will switch to making Optimus robots instead. (TechCrunch)
+ It’s the latest stage of the company’s pivot to AI… (FT $)
+ …as profit falls by 46%. (Ars Technica)
+ Tesla is still struggling to recover from the damage of Elon Musk’s political involvement. (WP $)

7 X is rife with weather influencers spreading misinformation
They’re whipping up hype ahead of massive storms hitting. (New Yorker $)

8  Retailers are going all-in on AI
But giants like Amazon and Walmart are taking very different approaches. (FT $)
+ Mark Zuckerberg has hinted that Meta is working on agentic commerce tools. (TechCrunch)
+ We called it—what’s next for AI in 2026. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Inside the rise of the offline hangout
No phones, no problem. (Wired $)

10 Social media is obsessed with 2016
…why, exactly? (WSJ $)

Quote of the day

“The amount of crap I get for putting out a hobby project for free is quite something.”

—Peter Steinberger, the creator of the viral AI agent Moltbot, complains about the backlash his project has received from security researchers pointing out its flaws in a post on X.

One more thing

The flawed logic of rushing out extreme climate solutions

Early in 2022, entrepreneur Luke Iseman says, he released a pair of sulfur dioxide–filled weather balloons from Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, in the hope that they’d burst miles above Earth.

It was a trivial act in itself, effectively a tiny, DIY act of solar geoengineering, the controversial proposal that the world could counteract climate change by releasing particles that reflect more sunlight back into space.

Entrepreneurs like Iseman invoke the stark dangers of climate change to explain why they do what they do—even if they don’t know how effective their interventions are. But experts say that urgency doesn’t create a social license to ignore the underlying dangers or leapfrog the scientific process. Read the full story.

—James Temple

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)

+ The hottest thing in art right now? Vertical paintings.
+ There’s something in the water around Monterey Bay—a tail walking dolphin!
+ Fed up of hairstylists not listening to you? Remember these handy tips the next time you go for a cut.
+ Get me a one-way ticket to Japan’s tastiest island.

DHS is using Google and Adobe AI to make videos

The US Department of Homeland Security is using AI video generators from Google and Adobe to make and edit content shared with the public, a new document reveals. It comes as immigration agencies have flooded social media with content to support President Trump’s mass deportation agenda—some of which appears to be made with AI—and as workers in tech have put pressure on their employers to denounce the agencies’ activities. 

The document, released on Wednesday, provides an inventory of which commercial AI tools DHS uses for tasks ranging from generating drafts of documents to managing cybersecurity. 

In a section about “editing images, videos or other public affairs materials using AI,” it reveals for the first time that DHS is using Google’s Veo 3 video generator and Adobe Firefly, estimating that the agency has between 100 and 1,000 licenses for the tools. It also discloses that DHS uses Microsoft Copilot Chat for generating first drafts of documents and summarizing long reports and Poolside software for coding tasks, in addition to tools from other companies.

Google, Adobe, and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The news provides details about how agencies like Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which is part of DHS, might be creating the large amounts of content they’ve shared on X and other channels as immigration operations have expanded across US cities. They’ve posted content celebrating “Christmas after mass deportations,” referenced Bible verses and Christ’s birth, showed faces of those the agency has arrested, and shared ads aimed at recruiting agents. The agencies have also repeatedly used music without permissions from artists in their videos.

Some of the content, particularly videos, has the appearance of being AI-generated, but it hasn’t been clear until now what AI models the agencies might be using. This marks the first concrete evidence such generators are being used by DHS to create content shared with the public.

It still remains impossible to verify which company helped create a specific piece of content, or indeed if it was AI-generated at all. Adobe offers options to “watermark” a video made with its tools to disclose that it is AI-generated, for example, but this disclosure does not always stay intact when the content is uploaded and shared across different sites. 

The document reveals that DHS has specifically been using Flow, a tool from Google that combines its Veo 3 video generator with a suite of filmmaking tools. Users can generate clips and assemble entire videos with AI, including videos that contain sound, dialogue, and background noise, making them hyperrealistic. Adobe launched its Firefly generator in 2023, promising that it does not use copyrighted content in its training or output. Like Google’s tools, Adobe’s can generate videos, images, soundtracks, and speech. The document does not reveal further details about how the agency is using these video generation tools.

Workers at large tech companies, including more than 140 current and former employees from Google and more than 30 from Adobe, have been putting pressure on their employers in recent weeks to take a stance against ICE and the shooting of Alex Pretti on January 24. Google’s leadership has not made statements in response. In October, Google and Apple removed apps on their app stores that were intended to track sightings of ICE, citing safety risks. 

An additional document released on Wednesday revealed new details about how the agency is using more niche AI products, including a facial recognition app used by ICE, as first reported by 404Media in June.

The AI Hype Index: Grok makes porn, and Claude Code nails your job

Everyone is panicking because AI is very bad; everyone is panicking because AI is very good. It’s just that you never know which one you’re going to get. Grok is a pornography machine. Claude Code can do anything from building websites to reading your MRI. So of course Gen Z is spooked by what this means for jobs. Unnerving new research says AI is going to have a seismic impact on the labor market this year.

If you want to get a handle on all that, don’t expect any help from the AI companies—they’re turning on each other like it’s the last act in a zombie movie. Meta’s former chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, is spilling tea, while Big Tech’s messiest exes, Elon Musk and OpenAI, are about to go to trial. Grab your popcorn.

Why Marketplaces Block AI Shopping Agents

Autonomous AI shopping agents are moving quickly from novelty to reality, with both financial and legal implications.

AI-first browsers such as Perplexity’s Comet and OpenAI’s Atlas can now search, compare, and initiate purchases with minimal human involvement.

That process, called agentic commerce, creates faster shopping for consumers and fewer clicks for merchants. It also challenges many ecommerce conventions, including the role marketplaces play in product discovery, transactions, and advertising.

Amazon and eBay have responded. Both are moving to restrict independent AI agents from completing purchases, citing security and user experience concerns. Yet in reality, the fight is almost certainly about control.

Shopping app icons on a smartphone screen

AI shopping agents threaten marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon, AliExpress, and many others.

Amazon vs. Perplexity

In November 2025, Amazon sued Perplexity, alleging that the Comet web browser masquerades as a human, accesses Amazon accounts, and places orders in violation of Amazon’s terms of service and computer fraud laws.

Third-party bots, according to Amazon, must operate openly and only with platform permission.

Perplexity countered that Comet acts on behalf of a human, with credentials stored locally for security, and suggested Amazon’s action was an attempt to protect its ad-driven business model and preserve control over shopping flows.

Essentially, Perplexity asks whether a platform can say no if a human authorizes an AI to shop.

eBay’s Ban

Just this month, eBay updated its user agreement to prohibit, without prior approval, “buy-for-me” agents and end-to-end LLM-driven checkout flows.

eBay positions the change as a safeguard against auction manipulation, fraud, and mistaken orders. The company, however, did leave room for “formally sanctioned” shopping agents, thus opening the door for partnerships that eBay can control.

Marketplace Concerns

Taken together, eBay’s update and Amazon’s lawsuit suggest that marketplaces seek to control agentic commerce relationships.

It makes sense. Marketplaces exist to aggregate and centralize shopping. It is the core service they provide and how they earn revenue. Hence agentic commerce is a threat.

Advertising. For the Amazon marketplace specifically and other marketplaces generally, advertising revenue is likely a chief concern.

According to its 2025 Q3 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Amazon generated $47 billion in “advertising services” revenue in the first nine months of last year.

The company is much more than a product marketplace. It is a publisher, too, offering sponsored listings, recommendation units, and paid placements — all deeply embedded in search results and category pages.

Autonomous agents bypass the ads. Instead of scrolling through sponsored products and recommendations, the AI shopping agent skips to an item and initiates checkout.

First-party data. A related concern is shopper data.

Ecommerce marketplaces observe, track, and use shopper behavioral information. They monitor what shoppers search for, which products they view, and the items they abandon. Those signals feed ranking algorithms, recommendation systems, and personalization models.

That data disappears when an external AI agent performs comparisons and decision-making outside the marketplace, which sees only the final purchase.

Transactions. In its case against Perplexity, Amazon did not dispute that the AI agent completed the transaction via Amazon’s own checkout. Nonetheless, an AI-driven checkout creates at least two concerns.

First, the marketplace has no way to ensure that the transaction was proper. What if the AI agent made an error? What if the price is wrong? Could those errors lead to customer service problems or even increased return rates? Maybe.

Second, upselling becomes presumably impossible when the human shopper never sees it.

Compromise

Yet the developers of AI shopping agents disagree.

Agentic commerce startups argue that shoppers should be free to choose their preferred AI when they interact with services or websites. An AI agent, the argument goes, is more like a browser or an accessibility aid than a competitor.

Per the developers, marketplaces that allow only a few AI partners block human shoppers, stifle innovation, and foster monopolies.

The coming compromise will likely enable marketplaces to approve access within reasonable limits.

Thus AI agents, perhaps even Perplexity’s Comet, will eventually access marketplaces via official APIs, subject to rate limits, identity verification, and possibly commercial arrangements. Think affiliate programs for bots that pay for access.

For small-to-medium ecommerce businesses, the agent-marketplace relationship will likely be a primary route for getting products into Perplexity, ChatGPT, and similar platforms. It could be a key revenue channel.

The New Content Failure Mode: People Love It, Models Ignore It via @sejournal, @DuaneForrester

You publish a page that solves a real problem. It reads clean. It has examples, and it has the edge cases covered. You would happily hand it to a customer.

Then you ask an AI platform the exact question that page answers, and your page never shows up. No citation, no link, no paraphrase. Just omitted.

That moment is new. Not because platforms give different answers, as most people already accept that as reality. The shift is deeper. Human relevance and model utility can diverge.

If you are still using “quality” as a single universal standard, you will misdiagnose why content fails in AI answers, and you will waste time fixing the wrong things.

The Utility Gap is the simplest way to name the problem.

Image Credit: Duane Forrester

What The Utility Gap Is

This gap is the distance between what a human considers relevant and what a model considers useful for producing an answer.

Humans read to understand. They tolerate warm-up, nuance, and narrative. They will scroll to find the one paragraph that matters and often make a decision after seeing the whole page or most of the page.

A retrieval plus generation system works differently. It retrieves candidates, it consumes them in chunks, and it extracts signals that let it complete a task. It does not need your story, just the usable parts.

That difference changes how “good” works.

A page can be excellent for a human and still be low-utility to a model. That page can also be technically visible, indexed, and credible, and yet, it can still fail the moment a system tries to turn it into an answer.

This is not a theory we’re exploring here, as research already separates relevance from utility in LLM-driven retrieval.

Why Relevance Is No Longer Universal

Many standard IR ranking metrics are intentionally top-heavy, reflecting a long-standing assumption that user utility and examination probability diminish with rank. In RAG, retrieved items are consumed by an LLM, which typically ingests a set of passages rather than scanning a ranked list like a human, so classic position discounts and relevance-only assumptions can be misaligned with end-to-end answer quality. (I’m over-simplifying here, as IR is far more complex that one paragraph can capture.)

2025 paper on retrieval evaluation for LLM-era systems attempts to make this explicit. It argues classic IR metrics miss two big misalignments: position discount differs for LLM consumers, and human relevance does not equal machine utility. It introduces an annotation scheme that measures both helpful passages and distracting passages, then proposes a metric called UDCG (Utility and Distraction-aware Cumulative Gain). The paper also reports experiments across multiple datasets and models, with UDCG improving correlation with end-to-end answer accuracy versus traditional metrics.

The marketer takeaway is blunt. Some content is not merely ignored. It can reduce answer quality by pulling the model off-track. That is a utility problem, not a writing problem.

A related warning comes from NIST. Ian Soboroff’s “Don’t Use LLMs to Make Relevance Judgments” argues you should not substitute model judgments for human relevance judgments in the evaluation process. The mapping is not reliable, even when the text output feels human.

That matters for your strategy. If relevance were universal, a model could stand in for a human judge, and you would get stable results, but you do not.

The Utility Gap sits right in that space. You cannot assume that what reads well to a person will be treated as useful by the systems now mediating discovery.

Even When The Answer Is Present, Models Do Not Use It Consistently

Many teams hear “LLMs can take long context” and assume that means “LLMs will find what matters.” That assumption fails often.

Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts” shows that model performance can degrade sharply based on where relevant information appears in the context. Results often look best when the relevant information is near the beginning or end of the input, and worse when it sits in the middle, even for explicitly long-context models.

This maps cleanly to content on the web. Humans will scroll. Models may not use the middle of your page as reliably as you expect. If your key definition, constraint, or decision rule sits halfway down, it can become functionally invisible.

You can write the right thing and still place it where the system does not consistently use it. This means that utility is not just about correctness; it’s also about extractability.

Proof In The Wild: Same Intent, Different Utility Target

This is where the Utility Gap moves from research to reality.

BrightEdge published research comparing how ChatGPT and Google AI approach visibility by industry. In healthcare, BrightEdge reports 62% divergence and gives an example that matters to marketers because it shows the system choosing a path, not just an answer. For “how to find a doctor,” the report describes ChatGPT pushing Zocdoc while Google points toward hospital directories. Same intent. Different route.

A related report from them also frames this as a broader pattern, especially in action-oriented queries, where the platform pushes toward different decision and conversion surfaces.

That is the Utility Gap showing up as behavior. The model is selecting what it considers useful for task completion, and those choices can favor aggregators, marketplaces, directories, or a competitor’s framing of the problem. Your high-quality page can lose without being wrong.

Portability Is The Myth You Have To Drop

The old assumption was simple. If you build a high-quality page and you win in search, you win in discovery, and that is no longer a safe assumption.

BCG describes the shift in discoverability and highlights how measurement is moving from rankings to visibility across AI-mediated surfaces. Their piece includes a claim about low overlap between traditional search and AI answer sources, which reinforces the idea that success does not transfer cleanly across systems.

Profound published a similar argument, positioning the overlap gap as a reason top Google visibility does not guarantee visibility in ChatGPT.

Method matters with overlap studies, so treat these numbers as directional signals rather than fixed constants. Search Engine Land published a critique of the broader trend of SEO research being over-amplified or generalized beyond what its methods can support, including discussion of overlap-style claims.

You do not need a perfect percent to act. You just need to accept the principle. Visibility and performance are not portable by default, and utility is relative to the system assembling the answer.

How You Measure The Utility Gap Without A Lab

You do not need enterprise tooling to start, but you do need consistency and intent discipline.

Start with 10 intents that directly impact revenue or retention. Pick queries that represent real customer decision points: choosing a product category, comparing options, fixing a common issue, evaluating safety or compliance, or selecting a provider. Focus on intent, not keyword volume.

Run the exact same prompt on the AI surfaces your customers use. That might include Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and an answer engine like Perplexity. You are not looking for perfection, just repeatable differences.

Capture four things each time:

  • Which sources get cited or linked.
  • Whether your brand is mentioned (cited, mentioned, paraphrased, or omitted).
  • Whether your preferred page appears.
  • Whether the answer routes the user toward or away from you.

Then, score what you see. Keep the scoring simple so you will actually do it. A practical scale looks like this in plain terms:

  • Your content clearly drives the answer.
  • Your content appears, but plays a minor role.
  • Your content is absent, and a third party dominates.
  • The answer conflicts with your guidance or routes users somewhere you do not want them to go.

That becomes your Utility Gap baseline.

When you repeat this monthly, you track drift. When you repeat it after content changes, you can see whether you reduced the gap or merely rewrote words.

How You Reduce The Utility Gap Without Turning Your Site Into A Checklist

The goal is not to “write for AI.” The goal is to make your content more usable to systems that retrieve and assemble answers. Most of the work is structural.

Put the decision-critical information up front. Humans accept a slow ramp. Retrieval systems reward clean early signals. If the user’s decision depends on three criteria, put those criteria near the top. If the safest default matters, state it early.

Write anchorable statements. Models often assemble answers from sentences that look like stable claims. Clear definitions, explicit constraints, and direct cause-and-effect phrasing increase usability. Hedged, poetic, or overly narrative language can read well to humans and still be hard to extract into an answer.

Separate core guidance from exceptions. A common failure pattern is mixing the main path, edge cases, and product messaging inside one dense block. That density increases distraction risk, which aligns with the utility and distraction framing in the UDCG work.

Make context explicit. Humans infer, but models benefit when you state assumptions, geography, time sensitivity, and prerequisites. If guidance changes based on region, access level, or user type, say so clearly.

Treat mid-page content as fragile. If the most important part of your answer sits in the middle, promote it or repeat it in a tighter form near the beginning. Long-context research shows position can change whether information gets used.

Add primary sources when they matter. You are not doing this for decoration. You are giving the model and the reader evidence to anchor trust.

This is content engineering, not gimmicks.

Where This Leaves You

The Utility Gap is not a call to abandon traditional SEO. It is a call to stop assuming quality is portable.

Your job now runs in two modes at once. Humans still need great content. Models need usable content. Those needs overlap, but they are not identical. When they diverge, you get invisible failure.

That changes roles.

Content writers cannot treat structure as a formatting concern anymore. Structure is now part of performance. If you want your best guidance to survive retrieval and synthesis, you have to write in a way that lets machines extract the right thing, fast, without getting distracted.

SEOs cannot treat “content” as something they optimize around at the edges. Technical SEO still matters, but it no longer carries the whole visibility story. If your primary lever has been crawlability and on-page hygiene, you now have to understand how the content itself behaves when it is chunked, retrieved, and assembled into answers.

The organizations that win will not argue about whether AI answers differ. They will treat model-relative utility as a measurable gap, then close it together, intent by intent.

More Resources:


This post was originally published on Duane Forrester Decodes.


Featured Image: LariBat/Shutterstock