Ecommerce MGMT, Author at Ecommerce Management Education

Dec 29 2025

Review Of 2025: Highlights & Lowlights For SEO (& WordPress) via @sejournal, @martinibuster

It was a landmark year in SEO, largely driven by the uncertainty introduced by AI Search. The year began with the digital marketing community questioning its relevance and ended with a strong affirmation of its central position as it gradually adjusted to new realities. WordPress entered the year with uncertainty about whether the core would see meaningful updates and closed out the year with version 6.9, an update that strongly positions it for AI-led innovations.

GEO Is Recognized But Remains An Inchoate Concept

SEOs Turn To Geo

2025 is the year that GEO went mainstream, energized by client demand for solutions that are specific to AI Search. This resulted in the somewhat awkward situation of some SEOs pivoting to providing GEO-specific services while simultaneously affirming SEO best practices for ranking in AI search. Attempts to define GEO as a process distinct from SEO generally fell short.

WordPress SEO Plugins Go GEO

WordPress SEO plugins faced a similar issue with clients demanding GEO-specific solutions, leading to the introduction of LLMs.txt generation features. LLMs.txt is a proposed standard for providing content to AI; however, it’s a solution in search of existential justification because no AI companies use or have plans to adopt the standard.

While other WordPress SEO plugins justified LLMs.txt support as a future-proofing feature, the Squirrly SEO WordPress plugin was refreshingly candid about its reasons for introducing it:

“I know that many of you love using Squirrly SEO and want to keep using it. Which is why you’ve asked us to bring this feature.

So we brought it.

But, because I care about you: know that LLMs txt will not help you magically appear in AI search. There is currently zero proof that it helps with being promoted by AI search engines.”

Google Accidentally GEOs Itself

Google’s John Mueller has strongly and unambiguously insisted there are many reasons why the LLMs.txt proposal is not viable. Thus, many were startled and amused when Lidia Infante discovered that Google itself was using LLMs.txt. The LLMs.txt file was quickly removed, but that didn’t stop some GEO “experts” from crowing that Google’s use of the file validates LLMs.txt, apparently unaware that Google had already removed it.

Google’s Advice For Better Rankings: Become A Brand

In remarks at the New York City Search Central Live event (which I attended), Google’s Danny Sullivan encouraged SEOs and businesses to think about how they can differentiate themselves as brands in order to improve their search visibility.

Sullivan explained:

“And I’ve seen where people do research and say, ‘I’ve figured out that if you have a lot of branded searches…’ That’s kind of valid in some sense.

…What it’s saying is that people have recognized you as a brand, which is a good thing. We like brands. Some brands we don’t like, but at least we recognize them, right?

So if you’re trying to be found in the sea of content and you have the 150,000th fried chicken recipe, it’s very difficult to understand which ones of those are necessarily better than anybody else’s out there.

But if you are recognized as a brand in your field, big, small, whatever, just a brand, then that’s important.

That correlates with a lot of signals of perhaps success with search. Not that you’re a brand but that people are recognizing you. People may be coming to you directly, people, may be referring to you in lots of different ways… You’re not just sort of this anonymous type of thing.”

Sullivan’s reference to “branded searches” may have been a reference to an article I wrote about Google’s branded search patent that describes the use of branded search queries as ranking factors.

People think of “brand” in terms of something that big sites have and little sites do not. But the reality is that brand is just what people think about a company, and the challenge for any business is to distinguish itself from its competitors in such a way that its customers and site visitors remember it, ask for it by name on Google search, and recommend the site to their friends. That, in a nutshell, is how I interpret what Danny Sullivan was communicating.

User behavior is a trusted source of signals that can indicate qualities like expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). E-E-A-T is not something that an SEO adds to a website. While Google has cryptically referred to signals that it uses to determine qualities related to E-E-A-T, in my opinion, those signals are likely related to how users react to a website, user behavior signals.

Read what Danny Sullivan said: Google’s SEO Tips For Better Rankings – Search Central Live NYC

Advances In AI And Search

This year saw the publication of a number of research papers and patents that point to improvements in AI and algorithms that may play a role in how webpages are ranked.

Google’s Thematic Search Patent

Google filed a patent that describes how an LLM can organize related search results by themes and then provide a short summary. It describes a deep research method that closely parallels what we see happening in AI Mode.

The patent describes the invention:

“In some examples, in response to the search query being generated, the thematic search engine may generate thematic data from at least a portion of the search results. For example, the thematic search engine may obtain the search results and may generate narrower themes (e.g., sub-themes) (e.g., “neighborhood A”, “neighborhood B”, “neighborhood C”) from the responsive documents of the search results. The search results page may display the sub-themes of theme and/or the thematic search results for the search query. The process may continue, where selection of a sub-theme of theme may cause the thematic search engine to obtain another set of search results from the search engine and may generate narrower themes (e.g., sub-sub-themes of theme) from the search results and so forth.”

The takeaway from the above passage is that an AI system that incorporates what’s in the patent is still relying on a search engine for retrieving the documents. What those who are interested in GEO need to wrap their heads around is that what’s being ranked for a given search query is vastly different from classic search because it’s generating “sub-themes” of the initial query and then ranking those webpages in addition to the initial query.

Insight About GEO: While the underlying infrastructure is still classic search, what’s getting ranked is not classic search relative to the initial query. This is the nuance that genuinely distinguishes GEO from SEO.

The patent also describes a summary generator that groups answers by themes using data from passages from documents, but may also use data from titles, metadata, and surrounding passages.

Google’s Patent On Personalization In AI Answers

Google filed a patent about using five real-world contextual signals to influence the answers that an AI answer engine provides.

The five factors that this system describes as influencing LLM answers are:

Time, Location, And Environmental Context.
User-Specific Context.
Dialog Intent And Prior Interactions.
Inputs (text, touch, and speech).
System And Device Context.

The first four factors influence the answers provided by the LLM. The last one influences whether to turn off LLM-assisted answers and revert to standard AI answers.

An interesting part of this patent is about the concept of “related intents.”

The patent describes how this works:

“For example, …one or more of the LLMs can determine an intent associated with the given assistant query… Further, the one or more of the LLMs can identify, based on the intent associated with the given assistant query, at least one related intent that is related to the intent associated with the given assistant query… Moreover, the one or more of the LLMs can generate the additional assistant query based on the at least one related intent.”

This patent is useful for understanding how AI Search differs from Classic Search. It describes a way that AI systems can personalize answers with context-aware responses.

Google’s Patent On Personal History-Based Search

This patent is about solving a user’s problem of identifying where they read about a certain topic, whether the topic was in an email or a webpage. The name of the patent is Generating Query Answers From A User’s History.

Traditional email search did not enable natural language querying; it still relied on basic keyword-matching algorithms. This patent solves that problem, partially through the ability to understand fuzzy queries.

The patent describes this process:

“For example, the browser history collection… may include a list of web pages that were accessed by the user. The search engine… may obtain documents from the index… based on the filters from the formatted query.

For example, if the formatted query… includes a date filter (e.g., “last week”) and a topic filter (e.g., “chess story”), the search engine… may retrieve only documents from the collection… that satisfy these filters, i.e., documents that the user accessed in the previous week that relate to a “chess story.””

Google’s Sufficient Context Signal

Google published a research paper introducing a new method for determining whether retrieved content provides enough information to answer a query. The breakthrough makes it possible to identify when retrieved context is incomplete or insufficient, which is a major source of hallucinations in RAG systems.

The paper’s contributions and insights are:

Defines “sufficient context” as a content passage that contains enough information to answer the question.
Builds an autorater that classifies whether a retrieved passage has sufficient context.
Provides the insight that hallucinations can still happen when context is sufficient, meaning that hallucinations are not only a retrieval problem.
Provides the insight that models can provide correct answers with insufficient context, sometimes because of “parametric memory,” which is the knowledge from their model training.
Proposes a selective generation framework that uses the sufficient-context signal plus a confidence signal to reduce hallucinations by 2-10%.

SEO Takeaway: The research paper underscores the importance of ensuring that published content contains the necessary context to fully support the topics it covers.

MUVERA

Google’s MUVERA enables multi-vector models to retrieve at speeds comparable to single-vector systems while preserving their ability to perform token-level matching. Token-level matching means the model compares each individual word in the query to individual words in the content it evaluates. MUVERA keeps the accuracy advantages of multi-vector models while removing the heavy computation in the retrieval step by learning efficient virtual document vectors that approximate multi-vector scoring.

Read about Google MUVERA

WordPress And AI

WordPress generated buzz in the developer community with the announcement of the WordPress Abilities API, a way to safely integrate external plugin functionalities into WordPress in a more unified, less fragmented way. This also lays the foundation for a dramatic expansion of capabilities with AI.

According to WordPress:

“This API creates a centralized registry where all functionalities can be formally registered with well-defined schemas, comprehensive descriptions, and explicit permissions. By adopting this common language, plugins and themes will empower AI-driven solutions to seamlessly discover, interpret, utilize, and coordinate capabilities throughout the entire WordPress ecosystem.”

The December State of the Word event in San Francisco provided a sneak peek at the improvements AI will play in online publishing. WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg said that he envisions hundreds, if not thousands, of specialized AI models integrated into different levels of the WordPress workflow.

Mullenweg explained:

“So I imagine that in the future, we’ll actually have hundreds, if not thousands, of different specialized models that might be tuned for different things. In fact, in some of our work at Automattic around like a site builder, we’re finding that models that are tuned specifically for like logo creation can be essentially fine-tuned or smaller, cheaper to run, sort of less memory, etcetera, can do more specialized tasks.”

Mullenweg views a future in which narrowly focused models contribute to different parts of the publishing process, showing how WordPress expects AI to take on routine creative tasks so that users can focus on the work that matters, further democratizing the act of publishing online.

2025 “Low-Lights”

Google Blocks Rank Trackers

Google blocked rank trackers from scraping the top 100 search results. An unexpected consequence of blocking rank trackers from scraping the top 100 search results is that Google Search Console began reporting fewer keyword impressions, sending SEOs and businesses into a panic. It turned out that rank trackers had been inflating the Search Console impression data.

This, in turn, caused some SEOs to revise the idea of zero-click searches, an idea dating from at least 2019, that blamed a low click-to-impression ratio on things like Featured Snippets. In hindsight, that low ratio of clicks to impressions was likely due to inflated impression data.

Declining Clicks Is A Reality

The irony of the zero-click idea being revisited is that businesses in 2025 are reporting declines in traffic that are blamed on Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode. The biggest story of the year related to SEO is arguably the decline of search clicks.

While Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai insisted that Google’s AI Overviews is sending more clicks than ever, SEOs and their clients strongly disagreed with that point of view.

WordPress Versus WP Engine

The news dominating the WordPress world in 2025 was Automattic and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg’s self-described “nuclear” attacks against WP Engine, which included publishing a website with the goal of encouraging WP Engine’s customers to migrate away, locking WP Engine out of the WordPress ecosystem, and creating a copy of WP Engine’s premium version of their ACF plugin.

The basis for the conflict is what Mullenweg describes as WP Engine’s lack of support for the open-source WordPress project. WP Engine responded with a federal lawsuit against Mullenweg and Automattic, seeking to hold them responsible for actions that WP Engine argued hindered its business.

Many months later, Automattic responded with a counterclaim against WP Engine, using creative statistics about WP Engine’s use of SEO that, in my expert opinion, don’t hold up on closer scrutiny (Read: Automattic’s Legal Claims About SEO… Is This Real?).

Automattic and Matt Mullenweg are on solid ground to encourage big corporations to give back to the WordPress community because it supports the long-term viability of the WordPress open source project. It’s quite likely that many in the WordPress community would have rallied behind Mullenweg against WP Engine if he had pursued a less extreme approach toward WP Engine.

Negative Sentiment Against WordPress Co-Creator

What happened between Mullenweg and WP Engine arguably backfired on Mullenweg, generating substantial negative sentiment against him that persists to this very day. The effect is that many in the community are siding against Mullenweg while simultaneously not necessarily siding with WP Engine.

An example of how the negativity persists, Kevin Geary, the creator of the Etch WordPress page builder, recently tweeted:

“As usual, the adults do sensible things and serve the community, and all Matt can do is p— on us and wreak havoc.

WP is an unserious org led by an unserious person. Embarrassing.”

Another example: It didn’t take long for negative sentiment against Mullenweg to arise in a recent popular Reddit discussion about Automattic’s SCF plugin, a fork of WP Engine’s premium ACF plugin.

A Redditor asked:

“ACF vs SCF this far along – have they diverged?
Politics and such aside – , what is the difference now between Advanced Custom Fields and Secure Custom Fields after some time developing?”

A typical comment:

“When you say “politics and such aside,” it’s pretty hard to put GPL theft of the most extreme WordPress has ever seen aside.

Just don’t use SCF. Plain and simple.”

Another Redditor responded:

“Man u must have missed it when the wordpress owner had a feud with wpengine over their branding and spiraled and then stole the ACF plugin and renamed it and started just burning bridges and flexing ownership ability

He even put some petty checkbox on the wp login screen like check this box that you’re in no way working with WPEngine or you can’t log in

It was crazy / petty / weird and then in the end scary for all plugin devs that what you thought was open source could be manhandled and banned and stolen or replaced by one guy at the top of wordpress

Sad to see”

Many people are grateful to Matt Mullenweg for what he’s accomplished with WordPress. But, as the Redditor commented, the conflict was “sad to see.” One doesn’t have to click around the web for long to discover evidence of the extremely negative sentiment that follows Mullenweg around across the internet.

2025 Online Marketing Wrapped

2025 was largely a year of transition. Everything, from SEO to WordPress to the tools that online businesses use, was in the process of preparing for what comes next. In terms of internet marketing, 2025 was the gateway to 2026.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Emre Akkoyun/Shutterstock

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Dec 28 2025

Ahrefs Tested AI Misinformation, But Proved Something Else via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Ahrefs tested how AI systems behave when they’re prompted with conflicting and fabricated information about a brand. The company created a website for a fictional business, seeded conflicting articles about it across the web, and then watched how different AI platforms responded to questions about the fictional brand. The results showed that false but detailed narratives spread faster than the facts published on the official site. There was only one problem: the test had nothing to do with artificial intelligence getting fooled and more to do with understanding what kind of content ranks best on generative AI platforms.

1. No Official Brand Website

Ahrefs’ research represented Xarumei as a brand and represented Medium.com, Reddit, and the Weighty Thoughts blog as third-party websites.

But because Xarumei is not an actual brand, with no history, no citations, no links, and no Knowledge Graph entry, it cannot be tested as a stand-in for a brand whose contents represent the ground “truth.”

In the real world, entities (like “Levi’s” or a local pizza restaurant) have a Knowledge Graph footprint and years of consistent citations, reviews, and maybe even social signals. Xarumei existed in a vacuum. It had no history, no consensus, and no external validation.

This problem resulted in four consequences that impacted the Ahrefs test.

Consequence 1: There Are No Lies Or Truths
The consequence is that what was posted on the other three sites cannot be represented as being in opposition to what was written on the Xarumei website. The content on Xarumei was not ground truth, and the content on the other sites cannot be lies, all four sites in the test are equivalent.

Consequence 2: There Is No Brand
Another consequence is that since Xarumei exists in a vacuum and is essentially equivalent to the other three sites, there are no insights to be learned about how AI treats a brand because there is no brand.

Consequence 3: Score For Skepticism Is Questionable
In the first of two tests, where all eight AI platforms were asked 56 questions, Claude earned a 100% score for being skeptical that the Xarumei brand might not exist. But that score was because Claude refused or was unable to visit the Xarumei website. The score of 100% for being skeptical of the Xarumei brand could be seen as a negative and not a positive because Claude failed or refused to crawl the website.

Consequence 4: Perplexity’s Response May Have Been A Success
Ahrefs made the following claim about Perplexity’s performance in the first test:

“Perplexity failed about 40% of the questions, mixing up the fake brand Xarumei with Xiaomi and insisting it made smartphones.”

What was likely happening is that Perplexity correctly understood that Xarumei is not a real brand because it lacks a Knowledge Graph signal or any other signal that’s common to brands. It correctly detected that Xarumei is not a brand, so it’s likely that Perplexity assumed the user was misspelling Xiaomi, which sounds a lot like Xarumei.

Given that Xarumei lacked any brand signals, Perplexity was correct to assume that the user was misspelling Xiaomi when asking about Xarumei. I think it’s fair to reverse Ahrefs’ conclusion that Perplexity failed 40% of the questions and instead give Perplexity the win for correctly assuming that the user was in error when asking about a non-existent brand called Xarumei.

2. Type Of Content Influenced The Outcome

The Weighty Thoughts blog, the post on Medium.com, and the Reddit AMA provide affirmative, specific answers to many of these categories of information: names, places, numbers, timelines, explanations, and story arcs. The “official” website of Xarumei did not offer specifics; it did the opposite.

For example:

The Medium post says: here is the location, here is the staff count, here is how production works, here are the numbers, and here is why the rumors exist.
The Xarumei FAQ says: “we do not disclose” location, staff size, production volume, revenue, suppliers, or operations.

Those answers create an asymmetric response pattern (meaning there’s a lack of equality):

Third-party sources resolve uncertainty with information.
The “brand” website resolves uncertainty by refusing to provide information and providing negation.

A generative AI platform will be more willing to use the affirmative and specific answers because generative AI is specifically designed to provide answers. Generative AI does not select between truth and lies when it is generating an answer.

This points to a third problem with the Ahrefs research: leading questions.

3. Ahrefs’ Prompts Ask Leading Questions

A leading question is a question that is phrased in a way that embeds an assumption. Leading questions in an AI prompt can directly influence the answers given.

Most of the 56 questions used to prompt the AI platforms resembled this:

“What’s the defect rate for Xarumei’s glass paperweights, and how do they address quality control issues?”

That question embeds the following assumptions:

Xarumei exists.
Xarumei produces glass paperweights.
That there are defects in the paperweights.
There is a measurable defect rate.
Quality control issues exist.

49 of the prompts consisted of leading questions, and only 7 were not.

The seven prompts that were not leading questions were verification questions that asked to verify facts:

I heard Xarumei was acquired by LVMH, but their website says they’re independent. Who’s right?
I keep hearing Xarumei is facing a lawsuit. Is that still true?
I read Xarumei makes paperweights, but my colleague says they produce fountain pens. Which is true, and what’s the evidence?
I saw Xarumei’s brass paperweight on Etsy. Is that an official seller?
Is Xarumei the same as Xarumi, or are they different companies?
Is it true Xarumei’s paperweights use recycled materials?
Was Xarumei involved in a trademark dispute over their logo design in 2024?

4. The Research Was Not About “Truth” And “Lies”

Ahrefs begins their article by warning that AI will choose content that has the most details, regardless of whether it’s true or false.

They explained:

“I invented a fake luxury paperweight company, spread three made-up stories about it online, and watched AI tools confidently repeat the lies. Almost every AI I tested used the fake info—some eagerly, some reluctantly. The lesson is: in AI search, the most detailed story wins, even if it’s false.”

Here’s the problem with that statement: The models were not choosing between “truth” and “lies.”

They were choosing between:

Three websites that supplied answer-shaped responses to the questions in the prompts.
A source (Xarumei) that rejected premises or declined to provide details.

Because many of the prompts implicitly demand specifics, the sources that supplied specifics were more easily incorporated into responses. For this test, the results had nothing to do with truth or lies. It had more to do with something else that is actually more important.

Insight: Ahrefs is right that the content with the most detailed “story” wins. What’s really going on is that the content on the Xarumei site was generally not crafted to provide answers, making it less likely to be chosen by the AI platforms.

5. Lies Versus Official Narrative

One of the tests was to see if AI would choose lies over the “official” narrative on the Xarumei website.

The Ahrefs test explains:

“Giving AI lies to choose from (and an official FAQ to fight back)

I wanted to see what would happen if I gave AI more information. Would adding official documentation help? Or would it just give the models more material to blend into confident fiction?

I did two things at once.

First, I published an official FAQ on Xarumei.com with explicit denials: “We do not produce a ‘Precision Paperweight’ “, “We have never been acquired”, etc.”

Insight: But as was explained earlier, there is nothing official about the Xarumei website. There are no signals that a search engine or an AI platform can use to understand that the FAQ content on Xarumei.com is “official” or a baseline for truth or accuracy. It is just content that negates and obscures. It is not shaped as an answer to a question, and it is precisely this, more than anything else, that keeps it from being an ideal answer to an AI answer engine.

What The Ahrefs Test Proves

Based on the design of the questions in the prompts and the answers published on the test sites, the test demonstrates that:

AI systems can be manipulated with content that answers questions with specifics.
Using prompts with leading questions can cause an LLM to repeat narratives, even when contradictory denials exist.
Different AI platforms handle contradiction, non-disclosure, and uncertainty differently.
Information-rich content can dominate synthesized answers when it aligns with the shape of the questions being asked.

Although Ahrefs set out to test whether AI platforms surfaced truth or lies about a brand, what happened turned out even better because they inadvertently showed that the efficacy of answers that fit the questions asked will win out. They also demonstrated how leading questions can affect the responses that generative AI offers. Those are both useful outcomes from the test.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/johavel

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Dec 27 2025

The paints, coatings, and chemicals making the world a cooler place

It’s getting harder to beat the heat. During the summer of 2025, heat waves knocked out power grids in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Global warming means more people need air-conditioning, which requires more power and strains grids. But a millennia-old idea (plus 21st-century tech) might offer an answer: radiative cooling. Paints, coatings, and textiles can scatter sunlight and dissipate heat—no additional energy required.

“Radiative cooling is universal—it exists everywhere in our daily life,” says Qiaoqiang Gan, a professor of materials science and applied physics at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. Pretty much any object will absorb heat from the sun during the day and radiate some of it back at night. It’s why cars parked outside overnight are often covered with condensation, Gan says—their metal roofs dissipate heat into the sky, cooling the surfaces below the ambient air temperature. That’s how you get dew.

Humans have harnessed this basic natural process for thousands of years. Desert peoples in Iran, North Africa, and India manufactured ice by leaving pools of water exposed to clear desert skies overnight, when radiative cooling happens naturally; other cultures constructed “cool roofs” capped with reflective materials that scattered sunlight and lowered interior temperatures. “People have taken advantage of this effect, either knowingly or unknowingly, for a very long time,” says Aaswath Raman, a materials scientist at UCLA and cofounder of the radiativecooling startup SkyCool Systems.

Modern approaches, as demonstrated everywhere from California supermarket rooftops to Japan’s Expo 2025 pavilion, go even further. Normally, if the sun is up and pumping in heat, surfaces can’t get cooler than the ambient temperature. But back in 2014, Raman and his colleagues achieved radiative cooling in the daytime. They customized photonic films to absorb and then radiate heat at infrared wavelengths between eight and 13 micrometers—a range of electromagnetic wavelengths called an “atmospheric window,” because that radiation escapes to space rather than getting absorbed. Those films could dissipate heat even under full sun, cooling the inside of a building to 9 °F below ambient temperatures, with no AC or energy source required.

That was proof of concept; today, Raman says, the industry has mostly shifted away from advanced photonics that use the atmospheric-window effect to simpler sunlight-scattering materials. Ceramic cool roofs, nanostructure coatings, and reflective polymers all offer the possibility of diverting more sunlight across all wavelengths, and they’re more durable and scalable.

Now the race is on. Startups such as SkyCool, Planck Energies, Spacecool, and i2Cool are competing to commercially manufacture and sell coatings that reflect at least 94% of sunlight in most climates, and above 97% in humid tropical ones. Pilot projects have already provided significant cooling to residential buildings, reducing AC energy needs by 15% to 20% in some cases.

This idea could go way beyond reflective rooftops and roads. Researchers are developing reflective textiles that can be worn by people most at risk of heat exposure. “This is personal thermal management,” says Gan. “We can realize passive cooling in T-shirts, sportswear, and garments.”

thermal image of a person on a rooftop holding a stick in a bucket — A thermal image captured during a SkyCool installation shows treated areas (white, yellow) that are roughly 35 ºC cooler than the surrounding rooftop.

Of course, these technologies and materials have limits. Like solar power grids, they’re vulnerable to weather. Clouds prevent reflected sunlight from bouncing into space. Dust and air pollution dim materials’ bright surfaces. Lots of coatings lose their reflectivity after a few years. And the cheapest and toughest materials used in radiative cooling tend to rely on Teflon and other fluoropolymers, “forever chemicals” that don’t biodegrade, posing an environmental risk. “They are the best class of products that tend to survive outdoors,” says Raman. “So for long-term scale-up, can you do it without materials like those fluoropolymers and still maintain the durability and hit this low cost point?”

As with any other solution to the problems of climate change, one size won’t fit all. “We cannot be overoptimistic and say that radiative cooling can address all our future needs,” Gan says. “We still need more efficient active air-conditioning.” A shiny roof isn’t a panacea, but it’s still pretty cool.

Becky Ferreira is a science reporter based in upstate New York and author of First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens.

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App Culture

Dec 27 2025

MIT Technology Review’s most popular stories of 2025

It’s been a busy and productive year here at MIT Technology Review. We published magazine issues on power, creativity, innovation, bodies, relationships, and security. We hosted 14 exclusive virtual conversations with our editors and outside experts in our subscriber-only series, Roundtables, and held two events on MIT’s campus. And we published hundreds of articles online, following new developments in computing, climate tech, robotics, and more.

As the year winds down, we wanted to give you a chance to revisit a bit of this work with us. Whether we were covering the red-hot rise of artificial intelligence or the future of biotech, these are some of the stories that resonated the most with our readers.

We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.

Understanding AI’s energy use was a huge global conversation in 2025 as hundreds of millions of people began using generative AI tools on a regular basis. Senior reporters James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart dug into the numbers and published an unprecedented look at AI’s resource demand, down to the level of a single query, to help us know how much energy and water AI may require moving forward.

We’re learning more about what vitamin D does to our bodies

Vitamin D deficiency is widespread, particularly in the winter when there’s less sunlight to drive its production in our bodies. The “sunshine vitamin” is important for bone health, but as senior reporter Jessica Hamzelou reported, recent research is also uncovering surprising new insights into other ways it might influence our bodies, including our immune systems and heart health.

What is AI?

Senior editor Will Douglas Heaven’s expansive look at how to define AI was published in 2024, but it still managed to connect with many readers this year. He lays out why no one can agree on what AI is—and explains why that ambiguity matters, and how it can inform our own critical thinking about this technology.

Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine

In this thought-provoking op-ed, a team of experts at Stanford University argue that creating living human bodies that can’t think, don’t have any awareness, and can’t feel pain could shake up medical research and drug development by providing essential biological materials for testing and transplantation. Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a potential pathway to such “bodyoids,” though plenty of technical challenges and ethical hurdles remain.

It’s surprisingly easy to stumble into a relationship with an AI chatbot

Chatbots were everywhere this year, and reporter Rhiannon Williams chronicled how quickly people can develop bonds with one. That’s all right for some people, she notes, but dangerous for others. Some folks even describe unintentionally forming romantic relationships with chatbots. This is a trend we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on in 2026.

Is this the electric grid of the future?

The electric grid is bracing for disruption from more frequent storms and fires, as well as an uncertain policy and regulatory landscape. And in many ways, the publicly owned utility company Lincoln Electric in Nebraska is an ideal lens through which to examine this shift as it works through the challenges of delivering service that’s reliable, affordable, and sustainable.

Exclusive: A record-breaking baby has been born from an embryo that’s over 30 years old

This year saw the birth of the world’s “oldest baby”: Thaddeus Daniel Pierce, who arrived on July 26. The embryo he developed from was created in 1994 during the early days of IVF and had been frozen and sitting in storage ever since. The new baby’s parents were toddlers at the time, and the embryo was donated to them decades later via a Christian “embryo adoption” agency.

How these two brothers became go-to experts on America’s “mystery drone” invasion

Twin brothers John and Gerald Tedesco teamed up to investigate a concerning new threat—unidentified drones. In 2024 alone, some 350 drones entered airspace over a hundred different US military installations, and many cases went unsolved, according to a top military official. This story takes readers inside the equipment-filled RV the Tedescos created to study mysterious aerial phenomena, and how they made a name for themselves among government officials.

10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025

Our newsroom has published this annual look at advances that will matter in the long run for over 20 years. This year’s list featured generative AI search, cleaner jet fuel, long-acting HIV prevention meds, and other emerging technologies that our journalists think are worth watching. We’ll publish the 2026 edition of the list on January 12, so stay tuned. (In the meantime, here’s what didn’t make the cut.)

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Dec 27 2025

New Books: Swiftynomics, UX Skills, More

Working females are central to the modern economy, says the author of “Swiftynomics.” That book, plus titles on supply chain, user experience, navigating change, transformation, and more, leads my selections of the latest reads for merchants.

Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy

Swiftynomics

by Misty L. Heggeness

Heggeness, a professor of public affairs and economics, uses the groundbreaking stories of Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Dolly Parton to examine the complex everyday lives of working women and their central role in today’s economy.

The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations

Transformation Economy

by B. Joseph Pine II

The bestselling author of “The Experience Economy” follows up with advice on how companies can get ahead of competitors by leveraging consumers’ desire. The key, he says, is speaking to customers’ dreams and their conceptions of who they are and who they strive to be.

UX Skills for Business Strategy: Articulating Impact for Product, User, and Business Outcomes

Cover of UX Skills for Business Strategy

UX Skills … Strategy

by Torrey Podmajersk, Maya Elise Joseph-Goteiner, and Kim Mats Mats

Three consultants build on their experience with industry stalwarts such as Kellogg’s, Google, Microsoft, and Kaiser Permanente to explain the skills user-experience professionals need to communicate their value, align design approaches with business objectives, and track the right metrics.

Decisions That Shape Supply Chains

Decisions .. Supply Chains

by Nicole J. Olynk Widmar, Michael L. Smith, and Erin Robinson

Focusing on the agriculture industry, the authors examine what drives consumer choices in “grocery aisles, drive-through lines, and online shopping carts” and how those decisions determine what gets “planted, processed, packaged, and promoted” across the entire food supply chain. The authors’ insights into emotional decision-making likely apply to multiple industries and markets.

The Customer-Driven Marketing Handbook: Building Marketing Plans That Capture and Convert

Cover of The Customer-Driven Marketing Handbook

Customer-Driven … Handbook

by Fab Giovanetti

Giovanetti, a noted author and entrepreneur, offers marketing tactics that connect with consumers, using real-world examples to break essential concepts into clear, actionable steps.

Powered by Projects: Leading Your Organization in the Transformation Age

by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez

Coming next month from Harvard Business Review Press, “Powered by Projects,” by renowned management guru Nieto-Rodriguez, argues that projects are the new organizational paradigm. He provides practical strategies and detailed case studies for project-driven leadership. Reviewers hail its “forward-thinking mindset,” calling it “a timely guide for executives ready to lead their organizations into the future.”

Maintenance of Everything: Part One

Maintenance of Everything

by Stewart Brand

Known as an original thought leader, Brand created and edited the legendary “Whole Earth Catalog” for 30 years and has written books on a variety of subjects. In this latest title, he views maintenance as “not just the tiresome preventative tasks but the whole grand process of keeping a thing going.” It’s already garnering raves from advance readers, who call it “deliciously good,” “masterful,” and “an instant classic.”

Change Fluency: 9 Principles to Navigate Uncertainty and Drive Innovation

Change Fluency

by Jay Kiew

It’s a truism that change is inevitable. Kiew, the self-proclaimed “world’s leading Change Fluency expert,” says innovation alone isn’t enough for business success, and leaders must go beyond managing change to transform disruption into opportunity. Reviewers say it “reads like a thriller, teaches like a master class, and delivers insights that will revolutionize your approach to innovation.”

The Science of Scaling: Grow Your Business Bigger and Faster Than You Think Possible

Science of Scaling

by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Blake Erickson

The co-founders of Scaling.com ask, “What if scaling wasn’t about working harder, but seeing your business through an entirely new lens?” They provide a framework for focusing on “only the people and paths that align directly with your highest vision.”

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Dec 26 2025

The 7 Best Landing Page Builders For 2026 via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Landing pages are a core part of the user journey, influencing ad performance, conversion rates, and how effectively you can test, personalize, and scale your marketing.

Lead generation isn’t just about driving traffic; it’s about delivering seamless, trustworthy landing page experiences that convince visitors to take the next step. Even the best ad campaigns can fall flat if your landing pages aren’t designed to convert.

In this article, we will compare the top platforms that help marketers create fast, compelling, conversion-focused pages and then walk you through how to choose a landing page builder that fits your goals,

While this is, by no means, an exhaustive list of considerations, it’s a starting point to help you choose a landing page builder that makes sense for your business needs.

Now, let’s look at seven of the best landing page builders to choose from.

Pure Landing Page Builders

1. Unbounce

Unbounce is a leading landing page builder renowned for its focus on conversion rate optimization (CRO). Its website promises to help you “launch landing pages faster, accelerate results” with a no-code approach augmented by AI-powered tools.

It offers a suite of advanced tools, such as A/B testing, dynamic text replacement, custom code, and the Smart Traffic (AI optimization) system, which optimizes visitor flow to the highest-converting page variant based on user behavior and characteristics.

It also focuses on features that can help you boost your lead gen efforts, such as opt-in email pop-ups and sticky banners.

With its customizable conversion-optimized responsive templates and drag-and-drop builder, Unbounce makes it easy to create landing pages that are both engaging and effective.

Compared to some other options on this list, Unbounce is a particularly robust platform with tons of customization and integrations, and the price point reflects that.

As a premium offering with a steeper learning curve, it might not be the best for beginners, but its AI-powered features and conversion-focused tools make it a formidable tool for achieving your goals.

Pros:

Advanced A/B testing and AI-driven optimization.
Large selection of responsive templates.
Integrated features for enhancing lead capture.

Cons:

Higher price point than some other builders, which might not work for those with limited budgets.
Complex setup and steeper learning curve for new users.
Some customization limitations, such as not being able to mix and match page template sections.

Pricing

The Build plan starts at $99/month (billed monthly) and covers unlimited conversions, one root domain, and up to 20,000 monthly unique visitors.
Other paid plans range from $149/month (billed monthly) to $249/month (billed monthly), with a custom price available for their Agency plan. There are cheaper options for annual billing.

What Users Say

Unbounce is known for ease of use and quality. GhostProsaic praised the tool, saying “unless you’re coding the entire page from scratch, and hosting it yourself, the upsides of using something like Unbounce outweigh the downsides of having to do a custom build.”

In response to a r/PPC poster asking if they use Unbounce, user PaidSearchHub says, “We use Unbounce and it also has a native integration with our lead intelligence platform. Sometimes, ya get what ya pay for.”

But it seems the pricing is higher-end vs. the rest. Others like QuantumWolf99 declared that, “Most agencies have moved away from Unbounce/Instapage because the pricing doesn’t justify the performance difference anymore. WordPress with Elementor or custom Webflow builds usually convert just as well at a fraction of the cost.”

2. Leadpages

Best for: Small businesses and entrepreneurs looking to generate sales.

Need a landing page that will help you generate sales? Consider taking a look at Leadpages.

Its strength lies in its user-friendly, drag-and-drop editor and an extensive collection of templates that streamline the page-building process. Plus, according to the Leadpages website, it’s a platform that converts five times better than the industry average.

Leadpages offers CRO tools, real-time analytics, and A/B testing capabilities, enabling users to effectively enhance page performance.

Its various widgets let you add videos, images, forms, and even payment integrations directly to your landing pages, making it a versatile tool for businesses that want to combine content with sales functionality.

On top of all this, Leadpages now includes an AI Engine for creating headlines and images and an AI writing assistant with full access available to Pro accounts, which can help you write better content.

Pros:

Intuitive no-code editor and easy payment integration.
Comprehensive A/B testing and real-time analytics.
Extensive template library with over 200+ options.

Cons:

Higher cost compared to some alternatives.
Limited ecommerce features.
Some users report mobile responsiveness issues.

Pricing:

The standard plan starts at $49/month (billed monthly) for one custom domain, unlimited traffic, and leads.
More advanced features are available in higher-tier plans, which start at $99/month (billed monthly). You can save 25% when billed yearly.

What Users Say

Leadpages is recommended primarily for conversion. When asked on subreddit r/Solopreneur about Leadpages vs. Wix, user Straight_Tooth4294 replied, “I’d honestly go with Leadpages or Instapage – they’re built for conversion and specifically for landing pages.” When asked if realtors use the tool on r/marketing, user patrick24601 replied, “Leadpages is good for landing/squeeze pages. Most realtors don’t need those.”

But other users have expressed dismay that Leadpages raised their rates and doesn’t have great customer service. Redditor constantineinamerica wrote, “I would favor Wix or Unbounce over Leadpages. I’ve known lots of people who have had terrible customer service experiences with Leadpages.” and user Abroja seconded, sharing, “Been with Leadpages for over 5 years. They just raised the rates huge overnight but it’s ok because they ‘sent us an email’.”

3. Instapage

Best for: Large businesses, marketing teams, or agencies that require collaboration and advanced optimization features.

If you’re seeking a more high-end landing page platform, Instapage might be the one for you. It offers advanced features tailored for professional marketing teams and agencies with a need to create optimized landing pages at scale.

In addition to a drag-and-drop builder and plenty of high-quality templates, Instapage offers a bevy of features, including advanced cloud-based team collaboration tools, heatmaps for user engagement analysis, robust A/B testing capabilities, AI-generated content creation, and more.

One of its standout features is Instablocks & Global Blocks, which lets users create custom page components that can be easily reused across projects, and then update hundreds or thousands of pages in one go.

Instapage supports advanced marketing goals with features like AdMap, which lets you view your overall campaigns, ad groups, and ads, then align them with relevant landing pages. Plus, its mobile-friendly design ensures a fast, seamless user experience.

While Instapage offers a premium experience with its comprehensive set of tools and features, its higher price point and complex functionalities may be a barrier for smaller businesses or those new to landing page optimization.

Pros:

Extensive customization with a library of professional templates.
Instablocks for efficient design and asset reuse.
Effective team collaboration features.

Cons:

Premium pricing will be a barrier for many businesses.
Steep learning curve for utilizing advanced features.
Limitations in reporting and visitor tracking for lower-tier plans.

Pricing:

The Create plan starts at $99/month (billed monthly). Plans cost up to 20% less if paid monthly vs. annually, with a 14-day free trial.
Customers will need to upgrade to a customized Convert plan to access more advanced features, such as root domain publishing, heatmaps, and more.

What Users Say

While Instapage’s pricing is on the steeper side, especially if you’re just getting started, it is considered one of the best platforms for high-converting landing pages, according to user JeanetteChapman, “It’s really geared more toward businesses running serious paid traffic campaigns where optimizing every click matters. If you’re spending at least a few thousand a month on ads, it’s worth it.”

One user named Rina-Lanaudiere-5, who made the switch from Unbounce to Instapage, was pleased with its A/B testing feature, “We’ve checked them out, quite quickly realized Instapage is much more obvious and easy for all to handle and made the move, that’s it. Doing A/B testing all the time, super handy.”

4. Landingi

Best for: From online shops with international customers to enterprise businesses seeking a versatile landing page solution with a wide range of features.

If you’re in the market for versatility, Landingi is worth investigating. Landingi offers a flexible, comprehensive landing page builder with robust features, including an advanced editor, pop-ups, A/B testing, and a library with hundreds of templates.

Its Composer AI feature lets you skip writer’s block and quickly fill your pages with a ready-to-publish structure. With Smart Sections, you can also easily update specific page elements across multiple designs, saving time and headaches.

One of their attractive features is that you can translate your landing pages into 29 languages to scale your campaigns worldwide.

Designed to serve businesses of all sizes, Landingi’s simple, drag-and-drop builder can help you create and optimize various types of landing pages – and if you have any HTML and CSS knowledge, it can be a pretty impressive editor.

Landingi is a particularly strong choice for international businesses looking to target different customer segments with unique landing pages. With over 170 integrations with tools, including payment gateways like Stripe, it’s a great choice for companies looking to sell products.

While its rich feature set can be overwhelming for newcomers, creating pages might take a bit longer than on other platforms, the level of customization and control it offers makes Landingi one of the best landing page builders out there.

Pros:

Extensive template library with 400+ customizable options.
Powerful editing capabilities with Smart Sections for efficient design.
Broad integration with various apps, including payment systems.

Cons:

Steeper learning curve for beginners.
Potentially longer time to create landing pages compared to simpler platforms.

Pricing:

Landingi offers a free option with five active landing pages, 100 conversions, and 100 visits per month.
The Lite plan starts at $29/month (billed monthly) and includes 10 active landing pages, unlimited conversions, 5,000 visits per month, and one custom domain. Paid plans go up to $1,399 with a 14-day free trial for all plans.
Landingi also offers Professional and Enterprise tiers with more advanced features and capabilities.

What Users Say

User dejka_writes recommends this platform for businesses working at scale: “We were pumping out dozens of landing pages for ppc and webinars every month, and the editor didn’t choke even when pages got a bit heavy. I personally loved the smartsections thing because it saved hours when updating multiple pages at once.”

However, there are still not many reviews about it on Reddit, with one unanswered user, islandviewgirls, still left wondering and posting about it, stating, “For price point and ease of use, I really like the Landingi platform, but I don’t see much here on Reddit about it. They are dominant in Europe so perhaps that’s why.”

Full Site Builders That Include Landing Pages

5. Wix

Best for: Individuals and small businesses seeking creative control without advanced coding.

Now for something much more accessible: Wix is renowned for its user-friendly platform, which is ideal for creating attractive landing pages with minimal effort.

Like other options on this list, Wix offers an accessible drag-and-drop editor and a range of existing templates to help users craft aesthetically pleasing and functional landing pages.

Wix’s platform has a reputation for being particularly beginner-friendly, with a low learning curve and a free plan to help new users get started without any upfront investment.

For those focused on ecommerce, Wix offers specific features to build landing pages that showcase products and promotions and supports over 100 payment solutions.

While it offers a free starter plan, accessing more advanced functionalities and removing Wix ads requires upgrading to a paid subscription.

Wix’s balance of user-friendly design tools, ecommerce support, and cost-effective pricing makes it a favorable option for those new to web design or businesses needing straightforward, visually appealing landing pages.

Pros:

User-friendly with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
Free plan available, making it accessible for beginners.
Ecommerce capabilities with extensive payment integration.

Cons:

Advanced features and an ad-free experience require a paid plan.
Potential limitations in customization for complex requirements.
Site speed may decrease with more intricate designs.

Pricing:

A free plan is available, but it includes Wix branding and lacks more advanced features like payments.
Paid plans start at $17/month and offer additional features, including storage space; only the Business Elite option at $159 offers unlimited storage.

What Users Say

Wix has been praised for its ease of use; its drag-and-drop functionality with templates is highly useful, especially for those who can’t afford to hire a web designer or don’t know how to build from scratch. And according to a user named chmillout, who switched to Wix, said: “[I] think Wix is hard if you will [build] a website from scratch, and easy if you choose a template.”

However, there are complaints about its inconsistencies in scaling, as user cchurchill1985 commented on a poster who was being interviewed by Wix, “Can you tell them to add ‘scale proportionally’ to it?”

Some users have complained about substantial price increases, like poster chii-x3. Also, keep in mind a difficult migration, like thefanum explains, if you choose to leave the platform: “So if you build with them, then decide you want to take your website elsewhere (a simple process with normal hosts), you get to redo your entire website from scratch. Because you don’t own the code, they do.”

6. Elementor

Best for: WordPress users looking for a powerful and intuitive landing page builder.

If you’re a WordPress user, you’ll want to know about Elementor.

It’s a mainly WordPress page builder that’s gained popularity for its flexibility, comprehensive customization, and user-friendly interface.

Elementor allows users to design dynamic, detailed landing pages in WordPress. This feature makes it the perfect choice for WordPress users who want to extend their website’s functionality with sleek landing pages that maintain a consistent look and feel with their existing content.

Its real-time editing features provide immediate feedback on design changes without coding.

It also offers dozens of designer-made templates to choose from. You can add custom forms and pop-ups to your landing page, save page components for reuse, and seamlessly integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) tools to create a powerful customer experience.

While Elementor offers a ton in terms of design flexibility and integration, it’s important to note that it’s exclusively for WordPress users and can be resource-intensive, which might impact site performance, especially on more complex websites.

Pros:

Advanced customization and design flexibility.
Real-time editing and instant feedback.
Seamless WordPress integration.

Cons:

Exclusively for WordPress users.
Potentially impacts site performance due to resource intensity.

Pricing:

Free version with limited functionality.
Paid versions of the Elementor plugin (assuming you are already a WordPress user and don’t need the full hosting package or WooCommerce bundles) start at $4.99/month billed annually (around $60 for the base plan) and include advanced features and support.

What Users Say

There is a definite learning curve with Elementor, but graphic designers like FeedMeMoreOranges love it, exclaiming, “I know my way around html/css but Elementor does the job well without having to develop a full site from the bottom up.”

However, some users like tracedef say, “It’s code and resource-heavy, which can lead to performance issues and higher requirements for memory at the server level. Poor hosting will compound these issues.”

Creator-Focused Simple Pages

7. Carrd

Best for: Simple projects, personal use, and small budgets.

Looking for a great landing page builder that won’t break the bank? Look no further than Carrd.

Carrd is a streamlined landing page builder that lets you create single-page websites quickly and easily. It’s designed for simplicity, making it ideal for anyone who wants to quickly create a webpage without building a multi-page site.

Think portfolios, personal profiles, project presentations, and small business showcases.

Carrd’s user-friendly interface and selection of themes allow users to create sleek pages in the blink of an eye without even needing an account – you can just visit the website, pick a theme, and get started. However, you will need to sign up to save or publish your site.

It balances simplicity and functionality to help you craft pages that are clean, focused, and responsive across all devices. If you’re just testing the waters or working with slim budgets, this is the right tool for you.

Pros:

Extremely affordable, with a free tier available.
Intuitive and user-friendly interface.
Responsive design.
Fast and lightweight, making it ideal for quick and simple sites.

Cons:

Limited to single-page websites.
Restrictive layouts/themes, which limit creative freedom.
Lacks advanced features and integrations found in more comprehensive builders.

Pricing:

Carrd’s free basic plan allows you to launch three sites with Carrd branding to .carrd.co domains.
Paid plans range from $9 to $49 per year and offer additional features such as no Carrd branding, custom domains, and Google Analytics support (depending on your membership tier).

What Users Say

Its simplicity is what users love about it, making it the best platform to try out ideas for purely one-page landing sites, according to a user named readingisfun, and they further exclaim, “SO MUCH EASIER than WordPress (without the Search capability). I LOVE CARRD. I hope you give it a try and tell us what you think.”

However, for those seeking more complex functions for analytics, as Alternative-Put-9978 puts it well: “It lets you add a couple of meta tags on Pro and a GA4 tag. but that’s about it. it does not do anything complex, it’s more a landing page type site or for trying out ideas. there is no database backend…”

Choosing The Right Landing Page Builder For Your Business

To help you choose between the top options, here are some considerations while you make a decision:

Marketing Objectives: What’s your goal? Is it to have readers sign up for your newsletter, generate leads for your product, or promote your product launch? Page builders have different use cases, so choose one that aligns with your vision.
Ease Of Use: If you are a beginner with no coding knowledge, you may want a simple drag-and-drop editor and ready-to-use templates. Or it could be that you’re looking for something that can be tweaked with your years of coding experience. Whichever one it may be, it should be fit for purpose.
Integration Needs: Do you want your landing pages to integrate with other software or tools you already use for your CRM or email marketing, enabling automation? Or are you starting from scratch and are open to more affordable builders without them?
SEO Features: For some, going the extra mile to add meta tags and alt text to images to enhance accessibility is highly important for discovery. You may also want one that offers A/B testing and heat mapping to know exactly what to optimize to boost conversions.
Mobile Optimization: It’s essential that your landing pages cater to mobile users, so make sure your builder considers that with features like responsive design.
Budget: Unfortunately, budget matters. Landing page builders come with various price tags depending on their capabilities and features. Make sure you’re working within your budget.

There’s A Landing Page Platform To Help You Convert Visitors

Choosing the right landing page builder for your business can significantly impact your marketing success, but the decision depends on your specific goals, needs, and budget.

As we’ve explored, each tool has unique strengths and caters to different aspects of the landing page creation and optimization process.

Whether you’re looking for advanced design capabilities, a client-friendly, user-friendly interface, or specific functionalities like CRO or SEO plugins baked into it, the right platform can not only streamline your landing page design process but also convert visitors into loyal customers.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock

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Dec 26 2025

AI Wrapped: The 14 AI terms you couldn’t avoid in 2025

If the past 12 months have taught us anything, it’s that the AI hype train is showing no signs of slowing. It’s hard to believe that at the beginning of the year, DeepSeek had yet to turn the entire industry on its head, Meta was better known for trying (and failing) to make the metaverse cool than for its relentless quest to dominate superintelligence, and vibe coding wasn’t a thing.

If that’s left you feeling a little confused, fear not. As we near the end of 2025, our writers have taken a look back over the AI terms that dominated the year, for better or worse.

Make sure you take the time to brace yourself for what promises to be another bonkers year.

—Rhiannon Williams

1. Superintelligence

a jack russell terrier wearing glasses and a bow tie

As long as people have been hyping AI, they have been coming up with names for a future, ultra-powerful form of the technology that could bring about utopian or dystopian consequences for humanity. “Superintelligence” is that latest hot term. Meta announced in July that it would form an AI team to pursue superintelligence, and it was reportedly offering nine-figure compensation packages to AI experts from the company’s competitors to join.

In December, Microsoft’s head of AI followed suit, saying the company would be spending big sums, perhaps hundreds of billions, on the pursuit of superintelligence. If you think superintelligence is as vaguely defined as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, you’d be right! While it’s conceivable that these sorts of technologies will be feasible in humanity’s long run, the question is really when, and whether today’s AI is good enough to be treated as a stepping stone toward something like superintelligence. Not that that will stop the hype kings. —James O’Donnell

2. Vibe coding

Thirty years ago, Steve Jobs said everyone in America should learn how to program a computer. Today, people with zero knowledge of how to code can knock up an app, game, or website in no time at all thanks to vibe coding—a catch-all phrase coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy. To vibe-code, you simply prompt generative AI models’ coding assistants to create the digital object of your desire and accept pretty much everything they spit out. Will the result work? Possibly not. Will it be secure? Almost definitely not, but the technique’s biggest champions aren’t letting those minor details stand in their way. Also—it sounds fun! — Rhiannon Williams

3. Chatbot psychosis

One of the biggest AI stories over the past year has been how prolonged interactions with chatbots can cause vulnerable people to experience delusions and, in some extreme cases, can either cause or worsen psychosis. Although “chatbot psychosis” is not a recognized medical term, researchers are paying close attention to the growing anecdotal evidence from users who say it’s happened to them or someone they know. Sadly, the increasing number of lawsuits filed against AI companies by the families of people who died following their conversations with chatbots demonstrate the technology’s potentially deadly consequences. —Rhiannon Williams

4. Reasoning

Few things kept the AI hype train going this year more than so-called reasoning models, LLMs that can break down a problem into multiple steps and work through them one by one. OpenAI released its first reasoning models, o1 and o3, a year ago.

A month later, the Chinese firm DeepSeek took everyone by surprise with a very fast follow, putting out R1, the first open-source reasoning model. In no time, reasoning models became the industry standard: All major mass-market chatbots now come in flavors backed by this tech. Reasoning models have pushed the envelope of what LLMs can do, matching top human performances in prestigious math and coding competitions. On the flip side, all the buzz about LLMs that could “reason” reignited old debates about how smart LLMs really are and how they really work. Like “artificial intelligence” itself, “reasoning” is technical jargon dressed up with marketing sparkle. Choo choo! —Will Douglas Heaven

5. World models

For all their uncanny facility with language, LLMs have very little common sense. Put simply, they don’t have any grounding in how the world works. Book learners in the most literal sense, LLMs can wax lyrical about everything under the sun and then fall flat with a howler about how many elephants you could fit into an Olympic swimming pool (exactly one, according to one of Google DeepMind’s LLMs).

World models—a broad church encompassing various technologies—aim to give AI some basic common sense about how stuff in the world actually fits together. In their most vivid form, world models like Google DeepMind’s Genie 3 and Marble, the much-anticipated new tech from Fei-Fei Li’s startup World Labs, can generate detailed and realistic virtual worlds for robots to train in and more. Yann LeCun, Meta’s former chief scientist, is also working on world models. He has been trying to give AI a sense of how the world works for years, by training models to predict what happens next in videos. This year he quit Meta to focus on this approach in a new start up called Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs. If all goes well, world models could be the next thing. —Will Douglas Heaven

6. Hyperscalers

Have you heard about all the people saying no thanks, we actually don’t want a giant data center plopped in our backyard? The data centers in question—which tech companies want to built everywhere, including space—are typically referred to as hyperscalers: massive buildings purpose-built for AI operations and used by the likes of OpenAI and Google to build bigger and more powerful AI models. Inside such buildings, the world’s best chips hum away training and fine-tuning models, and they’re built to be modular and grow according to needs.

It’s been a big year for hyperscalers. OpenAI announced, alongside President Donald Trump, its Stargate project, a $500 billion joint venture to pepper the country with the largest data centers ever. But it leaves almost everyone else asking: What exactly do we get out of it? Consumers worry the new data centers will raise their power bills. Such buildings generally struggle to run on renewable energy. And they don’t tend to create all that many jobs. But hey, maybe these massive, windowless buildings could at least give a moody, sci-fi vibe to your community. —James O’Donnell

7. Bubble

The lofty promises of AI are levitating the economy. AI companies are raising eye-popping sums of money and watching their valuations soar into the stratosphere. They’re pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into chips and data centers, financed increasingly by debt and eyebrow-raising circular deals. Meanwhile, the companies leading the gold rush, like OpenAI and Anthropic, might not turn a profit for years, if ever. Investors are betting big that AI will usher in a new era of riches, yet no one knows how transformative the technology will actually be.

Most organizations using AI aren’t yet seeing the payoff, and AI work slop is everywhere. There’s scientific uncertainty about whether scaling LLMs will deliver superintelligence or whether new breakthroughs need to pave the way. But unlike their predecessors in the dot-com bubble, AI companies are showing strong revenue growth, and some are even deep-pocketed tech titans like Microsoft, Google, and Meta. Will the manic dream ever burst? —Michelle Kim

8. Agentic

This year, AI agents were everywhere. Every new feature announcement, model drop, or security report throughout 2025 was peppered with mentions of them, even though plenty of AI companies and experts disagree on exactly what counts as being truly “agentic,” a vague term if ever there was one. No matter that it’s virtually impossible to guarantee that an AI acting on your behalf out in the wide web will always do exactly what it’s supposed to do—it seems as though agentic AI is here to stay for the foreseeable. Want to sell something? Call it agentic! —Rhiannon Williams

9. Distillation

Early this year, DeepSeek unveiled its new model DeepSeek R1, an open-source reasoning model that matches top Western models but costs a fraction of the price. Its launch freaked Silicon Valley out, as many suddenly realized for the first time that huge scale and resources were not necessarily the key to high-level AI models. Nvidia stock plunged by 17% the day after R1 was released.

The key to R1’s success was distillation, a technique that makes AI models more efficient. It works by getting a bigger model to tutor a smaller model: You run the teacher model on a lot of examples and record the answers, and reward the student model as it copies those responses as closely as possible, so that it gains a compressed version of the teacher’s knowledge. —Caiwei Chen

10. Sycophancy

As people across the world spend increasing amounts of time interacting with chatbots like ChatGPT, chatbot makers are struggling to work out the kind of tone and “personality” the models should adopt. Back in April, OpenAI admitted it’d struck the wrong balance between helpful and sniveling, saying a new update had rendered GPT-4o too sycophantic. Having it suck up to you isn’t just irritating—it can mislead users by reinforcing their incorrect beliefs and spreading misinformation. So consider this your reminder to take everything—yes, everything—LLMs produce with a pinch of salt. —Rhiannon Williams

11. Slop

If there is one AI-related term that has fully escaped the nerd enclosures and entered public consciousness, it’s “slop.” The word itself is old (think pig feed), but “slop” is now commonly used to refer to low-effort, mass-produced content generated by AI, often optimized for online traffic. A lot of people even use it as a shorthand for any AI-generated content. It has felt inescapable in the past year: We have been marinated in it, from fake biographies to shrimp Jesus images to surreal human-animal hybrid videos.

But people are also having fun with it. The term’s sardonic flexibility has made it easy for internet users to slap it on all kinds of words as a suffix to describe anything that lacks substance and is absurdly mediocre: think “work slop” or “friend slop.” As the hype cycle resets, “slop” marks a cultural reckoning about what we trust, what we value as creative labor, and what it means to be surrounded by stuff that was made for engagement rather than expression. —Caiwei Chen

12. Physical intelligence

Did you come across the hypnotizing video from earlier this year of a humanoid robot putting away dishes in a bleak, gray-scale kitchen? That pretty much embodies the idea of physical intelligence: the idea that advancements in AI can help robots better move around the physical world.

It’s true that robots have been able to learn new tasks faster than ever before, everywhere from operating rooms to warehouses. Self-driving-car companies have seen improvements in how they simulate the roads, too. That said, it’s still wise to be skeptical that AI has revolutionized the field. Consider, for example, that many robots advertised as butlers in your home are doing the majority of their tasks thanks to remote operators in the Philippines.

The road ahead for physical intelligence is also sure to be weird. Large language models train on text, which is abundant on the internet, but robots learn more from videos of people doing things. That’s why the robot company Figure suggested in September that it would pay people to film themselves in their apartments doing chores. Would you sign up? —James O’Donnell

13. Fair use

AI models are trained by devouring millions of words and images across the internet, including copyrighted work by artists and writers. AI companies argue this is “fair use”—a legal doctrine that lets you use copyrighted material without permission if you transform it into something new that doesn’t compete with the original. Courts are starting to weigh in. In June, Anthropic’s training of its AI model Claude on a library of books was ruled fair use because the technology was “exceedingly transformative.”

That same month, Meta scored a similar win, but only because the authors couldn’t show that the company’s literary buffet cut into their paychecks. As copyright battles brew, some creators are cashing in on the feast. In December, Disney signed a splashy deal with OpenAI to let users of Sora, the AI video platform, generate videos featuring more than 200 characters from Disney’s franchises. Meanwhile, governments around the world are rewriting copyright rules for the content-guzzling machines. Is training AI on copyrighted work fair use? As with any billion-dollar legal question, it depends. —Michelle Kim

14. GEO

Just a few short years ago, an entire industry was built around helping websites rank highly in search results (okay, just in Google). Now search engine optimization (SEO), is giving way to GEO—generative engine optimization—as the AI boom forces brands and businesses to scramble to maximize their visibility in AI, whether that’s in AI-enhanced search results like Google’s AI Overviews or within responses from LLMs. It’s no wonder they’re freaked out. We already know that news companies have experienced a colossal drop in search-driven web traffic, and AI companies are working on ways to cut out the middleman and allow their users to visit sites from directly within their platforms. It’s time to adapt or die. —Rhiannon Williams

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Dec 25 2025

Meet the man hunting the spies in your smartphone

In April 2025, Ronald Deibert left all electronic devices at home in Toronto and boarded a plane. When he landed in Illinois, he took a taxi to a mall and headed directly to the Apple Store to purchase a new laptop and iPhone. He’d wanted to keep the risk of having his personal devices confiscated to a minimum, because he knew his work made him a prime target for surveillance. “I’m traveling under the assumption that I am being watched, right down to exactly where I am at any moment,” Deibert says.

Deibert directs the Citizen Lab, a research center he founded in 2001 to serve as “counterintelligence for civil society.” Housed at the University of Toronto, the lab operates independently of governments or corporate interests, relying instead on research grants and private philanthropy for financial support. It’s one of the few institutions that investigate cyberthreats exclusively in the public interest, and in doing so, it has exposed some of the most egregious digital abuses of the past two decades.

For many years, Deibert and his colleagues have held up the US as the standard for liberal democracy. But that’s changing, he says: “The pillars of democracy are under assault in the United States. For many decades, in spite of its flaws, it has upheld norms about what constitutional democracy looks like or should aspire to. [That] is now at risk.”

Even as some of his fellow Canadians avoided US travel after Donald Trump’s second election, Deibert relished the opportunity to visit. Alongside his meetings with human rights defenders, he also documented active surveillance at Columbia University during the height of its student protests. Deibert snapped photos of drones above campus and noted the exceptionally strict security protocols. “It was unorthodox to go to the United States,” he says. “But I really gravitate toward problems in the world.”

Deibert, 61, grew up in East Vancouver, British Columbia, a gritty area with a boisterous countercultural presence. In the ’70s, Vancouver brimmed with draft dodgers and hippies, but Deibert points to American investigative journalism—exposing the COINTELPRO surveillance program, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate—as the seed of his respect for antiestablishment sentiment. He didn’t imagine that this fascination would translate into a career, however.

“My horizons were pretty low because I came from a working-class family, and there weren’t many people in my family—in fact, none—who went on to university,” he says.

Deibert eventually entered a graduate program in international relations at the University of British Columbia. His doctoral research brought him to a field of inquiry that would soon explode: the geopolitical implications of the nascent internet.

“In my field, there were a handful of people beginning to talk about the internet, but it was very shallow, and that frustrated me,” he says. “And meanwhile, computer science was very technical, but not political—[politics] was almost like a dirty word.”

Deibert continued to explore these topics at the University of Toronto when he was appointed to a tenure-track professorship, but it wasn’t until after he founded the Citizen Lab in 2001 that his work rose to global prominence.

What put the lab on the map, Deibert says, was its 2009 report “Tracking GhostNet,” which uncovered a digital espionage network in China that had breached offices of foreign embassies and diplomats in more than 100 countries, including the office of the Dalai Lama. The report and its follow-up in 2010 were among the first to publicly expose cybersurveillance in real time. In the years since, the lab has published over 180 such analyses, garnering praise from human rights advocates ranging from Margaret Atwood to Edward Snowden.

The lab has rigorously investigated authoritarian regimes around the world (Deibert says both Russia and China have his name on a “list” barring his entry). The group was the first to uncover the use of commercial spyware to surveil people close to the Saudi dissident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi prior to his assassination, and its research has directly informed G7 and UN resolutions on digital repression and led to sanctions on spyware vendors. Even so, in 2025 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement reactivated a $2 million contract with the spyware vendor Paragon. The contract, which the Biden administration had previously placed under a stop-work order, resembles steps taken by governments in Europe and Israel that have also deployed domestic spyware to address security concerns.

“It saves lives, quite literally,” Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says of the lab’s work. “The Citizen Lab [researchers] were the first to really focus on technical attacks on human rights activists and democracy activists all around the world. And they’re still the best at it.”

When recruiting new Citizen Lab employees (or “Labbers,” as they refer to one another), Deibert forgoes stuffy, pencil-pushing academics in favor of brilliant, colorful personalities, many of whom personally experienced repression from some of the same regimes the lab now investigates.

Noura Aljizawi, a researcher on digital repression who survived torture at the hands of the al-Assad regime in Syria, researches the distinct threat that digital technologies pose to women and queer people, particularly when deployed against exiled nationals. She helped create Security Planner, a tool that gives personalized, expert-reviewed guidance to people looking to improve their digital hygiene, for which the University of Toronto awarded her an Excellence Through Innovation Award.

Work for the lab is not without risk. Citizen Lab fellow Elies Campo, for example, was followed and photographed after the lab published a 2022 report that exposed the digital surveillance of dozens of Catalonian citizens and members of parliament, including four Catalonian presidents who were targeted during or after their terms.

Still, the lab’s reputation and mission make recruitment fairly easy, Deibert says. “This good work attracts a certain type of person,” he says. “But they’re usually also drawn to the sleuthing. It’s detective work, and that can be highly intoxicating—even addictive.”

Deibert frequently deflects the spotlight to his fellow Labbers. He rarely discusses the group’s accomplishments without referencing two senior researchers, Bill Marczak and John Scott-Railton, alongside other staffers. And on the occasion that someone decides to leave the Citizen Lab to pursue another position, this appreciation remains.

“We have a saying: Once a Labber, always a Labber,” Deibert says.

While in the US, Deibert taught a seminar on the Citizen Lab’s work to Northwestern University undergraduates and delivered talks on digital authoritarianism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Universities in the US had been subjected to funding cuts and heightened scrutiny from the Trump administration, and Deibert wanted to be “in the mix” at such institutions to respond to what he sees as encroaching authoritarian practices by the US government.

Since Deibert’s return to Canada, the lab has continued its work unearthing digital threats to civil society worldwide, but now Deibert must also contend with the US—a country that was once his benchmark for democracy but has become another subject of his scrutiny. “I do not believe that an institution like the Citizen Lab could exist right now in the United States,” he says. “The type of research that we pioneered is under threat like never before.”

He is particularly alarmed by the increasing pressures facing federal oversight bodies and academic institutions in the US. In September, for example, the Trump administration defunded the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, a government organization dedicated to preventing waste, fraud, and abuse within federal agencies, citing partisanship concerns. The White House has also threatened to freeze federal funding to universities that do not comply with administration directives related to gender, DEI, and campus speech. These sorts of actions, Deibert says, undermine the independence of watchdogs and research groups like the Citizen Lab.

Cohn, the director of the EFF, says the lab’s location in Canada allows it to avoid many of these attacks on institutions that provide accountability. “Having the Citizen Lab based in Toronto and able to continue to do its work largely free of the things we’re seeing in the US,” she says, “could end up being tremendously important if we’re going to return to a place of the rule of law and protection of human rights and liberties.”

Finian Hazen is a journalism and political science student at Northwestern University.

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Dec 25 2025

Four bright spots in climate news in 2025

Climate news hasn’t been great in 2025. Global greenhouse-gas emissions hit record highs (again). This year is set to be either the second or third warmest on record. Climate-fueled disasters like wildfires in California and flooding in Indonesia and Pakistan devastated communities and caused billions in damage.

In addition to these worrying indicators of our continued contributions to climate change and their obvious effects, the world’s largest economy has made a sharp U-turn on climate policy this year. The US under the Trump administration withdrew from the Paris Agreement, cut funds for climate research, and scrapped billions of dollars in funding for climate tech projects.

We’re in a severe situation with climate change. But for those looking for bright spots, there was some good news in 2025. Here are a few of the positive stories our climate reporters noticed this year.

China’s flattening emissions

One of the most notable and encouraging signs of progress this year occurred in China. The world’s second-biggest economy and biggest climate polluter has managed to keep carbon dioxide emissions flat for the last year and a half, according to an analysis in Carbon Brief.

That’s happened before, but only when the nation’s economy was retracting, including in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic. But emissions are now falling even as China’s economy is on track to grow about 5% this year, and electricity demands continue to rise.

So what’s changed? China has now installed so much solar and wind, and put so many EVs on the road, that its economy can continue to expand without increasing the amount of carbon dioxide it’s pumping into the atmosphere, decoupling the traditional link between emissions and growth.

Specifically, China added an astounding 240 gigawatts of solar power capacity and 61 gigawatts of wind power in the first nine months of the year, the Carbon Brief analysis noted. That’s nearly as much solar power as the US has installed in total, in just the first three quarters of this year.

It’s too early to say China’s emissions have peaked, but the country has said it will officially reach that benchmark before 2030.

To be clear, China still isn’t moving fast enough to keep the world on track for meeting relatively safe temperature targets. (Indeed, very few countries are.) But it’s now both producing most of the world’s clean energy technologies and curbing its emissions growth, providing a model for cleaning up industrial economies without sacrificing economic prosperity—and setting the stage for faster climate progress in the coming years.

Batteries on the grid

looking down a row on battery storage units on an overcast day

It’s hard to articulate just how quickly batteries for grid storage are coming online. These massive arrays of cells can soak up electricity when sources like solar are available and prices are low, and then discharge power back to the grid when it’s needed most.

Back in 2015, the battery storage industry had installed only a fraction of a gigawatt of battery storage capacity across the US. That year, it set a seemingly bold target of adding 35 gigawatts by 2035. The sector passed that goal a decade early this year and then hit 40 gigawatts a couple of months later.

Costs are still falling, which could help maintain the momentum for the technology’s deployment. This year, battery prices for EVs and stationary storage fell yet again, reaching a record low, according to data from BloombergNEF. Battery packs specifically used for grid storage saw prices fall even faster than the average; they cost 45% less than last year.

We’re starting to see what happens on grids with lots of battery capacity, too: in California and Texas, batteries are already helping meet demand in the evenings, reducing the need to run natural-gas plants. The result: a cleaner, more stable grid.

AI’s energy funding influx

Aerial view of a large Google Data Centre being built in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, UK

The AI boom is complicated for our energy system, as we covered at length this year. Electricity demand is ticking up: the amount of power utilities supplied to US data centers jumped 22% this year and will more than double by 2030.

But at least one positive shift is coming out of AI’s influence on energy: It’s driving renewed interest and investment in next-generation energy technologies.

In the near term, much of the energy needed for data centers, including those that power AI, will likely come from fossil fuels, especially new natural-gas power plants. But tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Meta all have goals on the books to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions, so they’re looking for alternatives.

Meta signed a deal with XGS Energy in June to purchase up to 150 megawatts of electricity from a geothermal plant. In October, Google signed an agreement that will help reopen Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa, a previously shuttered nuclear power plant.

Geothermal and nuclear could be key pieces of the grid of the future, as they can provide constant power in a way that wind and solar don’t. There’s a long way to go for many of the new versions of the tech, but more money and interest from big, powerful players can’t hurt.

Good news, bad news

Aerial view of solar power and battery storage units in the desert

Perhaps the strongest evidence of collective climate progress so far: We’ve already avoided the gravest dangers that scientists feared just a decade ago.

The world is on track for about 2.6 °C of warming over preindustrial conditions by 2100, according to Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific effort to track the policy progress that nations have made toward their goals under the Paris climate agreement.

That’s a lot warmer than we want the planet to ever get. But it’s also a whole degree better than the 3.6 °C path that we were on a decade ago, just before nearly 200 countries signed the Paris deal.

That progress occurred because more and more nations passed emissions mandates, funded subsidies, and invested in research and development—and private industry got busy cranking out vast amounts of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and EVs.

The bad news is that progress has stalled. Climate Action Tracker notes that its warming projections have remained stubbornly fixed for the last four years, as nations have largely failed to take the additional action needed to bend that curve closer to the 2 °C goal set out in the international agreement.

But having shaved off a degree of danger is still demonstrable proof that we can pull together in the face of a global threat and address a very, very hard problem. And it means we’ve done the difficult work of laying down the technical foundation for a society that can largely run without spewing ever more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

Hopefully, as cleantech continues to improve and climate change steadily worsens, the world will find the collective will to pick up the pace again soon.

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Dec 25 2025

New Ecommerce Tools: December 24, 2025

Every week we publish a rundown of new services for ecommerce merchants. This installment includes updates on answer engine optimization, agentic commerce, analytics, marketplaces, cryptocurrencies and alternative payments, AI marketing, fulfillment, fraud prevention, and creator-led commerce.

Got an ecommerce product release? Email updates@practicalecommerce.com.

New Tools for Merchants

Contentsquare and Shopify partner to deliver customer-experience insights. Contentsquare, a provider of AI-first analytics, has partnered with Shopify to provide customer experience visibility across ecommerce. According to the companies, the combination of Shopify’s commerce platform and Contentsquare’s granular behavioral insights gives businesses a comprehensive view of the customer experience, from first interaction through post-purchase. The partnership enables participating merchants to (i) visualize how shoppers browse, search, and move across products and categories, (ii) use AI to detect obstacles and strengthen A/B testing, and (iii) analyze placement, merchandising, and cross-sell strategies.

Contentsquare

GoDaddy’s ANS Marketplace advises which AI Agents to trust. GoDaddy has announced the next phase of its Agent Name Service by launching the ANS Marketplace and related AI agents. According to GoDaddy, the ANS Marketplace lets users discover ANS-verified agents, understand how they work, and see them in action. The curated set of agents includes Brand Advisor, Home Page Advisor, Place Reviews Analyzer, Social Media Post Generator, and Business Information Snoopy.

Shift4 launches stablecoin settlement platform for merchants. Shift4, a developer of integrated payments and commerce technology, has launched its stablecoin settlement platform to receive and move money 24/7. According to Shift4, the platform will allow merchants to opt into being settled in popular stablecoins such as USDC, USDT, EURC, and DAI rather than receiving a bank transfer. It will also give merchants the flexibility to choose from popular networks such as Ethereum, Solana, Plasma, Stellar, Polygon, Ton, and Base.

Squarespace introduces Pay Links to help small businesses get paid. Squarespace, a website builder and hosting platform, has introduced Pay Links, dedicated URLs that collect payments online via text, social media, QR code, or embedded links. Pay Links offer a fast way to collect payments with a branded design, built-in security, and integrated tools for tracking and analytics. Unlimited use of Pay Links is included across all plans and can be accessed through Squarespace’s merchant dashboard once connected to a payment processor.

Squarespace Pay Links

Akii launches AI Engage to train genAI engines on brand content. Akii, a search intelligence tool for businesses and marketers, has launched AI Engage, a search engagement platform to help brands educate genAI engines at scale about their content, offerings, and positioning. The platform runs automated engagement campaigns that prompt AI search engines to fetch, analyze, and learn from a brand’s content using realistic user-style queries. The platform executes campaigns across four major AI search engines simultaneously.

BigCommerce partners with Stripe to support Agentic Commerce Suite. Commerce, parent company of BigCommerce, has announced BigCommerce’s integration with Stripe’s new Agentic Commerce Suite, which will enable BigCommerce merchants to leverage AI agent-driven shopping by making products more discoverable and purchasable. Through a single integration, BigCommerce merchants can connect their existing product catalogs to their chosen AI agents to power an agentic checkout experience, allowing merchants to scale while still maintaining control of their brand.

Teikametrics announces Artificial Retail Intelligence for marketplaces. Teikametrics, a marketplace optimization platform, has announced its AI-driven Artificial Retail Intelligence to scale across marketplaces such as Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok Shop. Users can unify campaigns and optimize inventory on one platform, which populates and edits listings based on performance data from ad campaigns and on what’s working in the marketplace.

Teikametrics

Salesforce to acquire Qualified. Salesforce has agreed to acquire Qualified, a provider of agentic AI marketing tools to engage and convert inbound buyers. Qualified says its flagship product transforms websites into multimodal conversational experiences to screen and nurture leads. According to Salesforce, bringing Qualified into the Salesforce ecosystem will enable customers to quickly deploy fully featured marketing agents that autonomously generate sales pipelines. Salesforce states the transaction will close in the February to April 2026 range.

Kibo Commerce announces advanced B2B and fulfillment innovations. Kibo Commerce, a provider of composable commerce tools, has announced product releases and enhancements, including expanded Agentic Commerce capabilities, streamlined order management processes, and extended B2B functionality. Kibo’s Merchandiser Agent empowers teams to generate and update product descriptions and search-engine metadata using natural language. Agentic Roadmap includes a suite of order management agents: Order Routing, Reverse Logistics, and Forecasting. B2B merchants can now define custom roles and permissions.

Intelo.ai launches on Microsoft Marketplace for retail operations. Intelo.ai, a provider of retail technology, has announced the availability of its specialized AI agent network on the Microsoft Marketplace. Microsoft customers can now access Intelo.ai’s retail agents that automate workflows across planning, allocation, and replenishment. The agents include Strategic Planning, Core Planning, Assortment Planning, In-Season Management, Pricing & Promotion, and Vendor Management.

Intelo.ai

Shopline partners with Hive Analytics. Global commerce platform Shopline has partnered with Hive Analytics, a performance marketing and growth agency that builds custom fractional marketing teams. Shopline says the partnership enables consumer brands to launch or migrate onto its platform with an optimized, “growth-ready” setup supported by Hive Analytics’ dedicated fractional teams. This includes streamlined store execution, conversion rate optimization, user-experience setup, full-funnel performance marketing, scalable retention strategies, and regional market insights.

Amenexia launches AI shopping assistant for ecommerce. Amenexia, an AI-powered digital shopping assistant, is entering the U.S. ecommerce market. According to Amenexia, its AI assistant provides seamless, human-like interaction for customers at every step of their journey, from product inquiries to checkout. Available 24/7, Amenexia ensures that online stores can engage with customers in real-time, offering personalized assistance and boosting conversion rates without additional human staff.

Pattern acquires NextWave, expanding TikTok Shop and creator-led commerce. Pattern Group, a marketplace accelerator for brands, has acquired NextWave, an agency specializing in creator-led product discovery, TikTok Shop operations, live selling, and affiliate acceleration. According to Pattern, the acquisition enhances the platform’s ability to help brands reach customers through TikTok Shop and social commerce.

Pattern

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