Plus: Google Still Dominates Search Amid AI Uprising |
| Marketers should always keep their eyes open to new technology and work to make sure their clients show up best in whatever medium they’re targeting. But when it comes to the changing landscape of online search, it might be too early to tear up old plans to optimize content for AI-powered search engines: Google is thriving. New data from content performance firm BrightEdge shows that for the first time in more than nine months, Google has increased its already huge search market share. Google’s share had fallen to 90.54% this summer, and now it’s grown to 90.71%, clawing back many searches—which amount to billions in potential revenue—from AI-powered upstarts. BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu said that as more people began turning to platforms like ChatGPT and Claude for search, Google doubled down on its AI offerings. AI Overviews started showing up on some searches last year, and now any Google search can take advantage of its AI capabilities by clicking the “AI Mode” button at the right of the search bar. Google has also integrated AI into the Chrome browser, expanding where casual users can get the AI search experience. BrightEdge’s figures include all Google searches, regardless of AI involvement. “There’s this bigger strategic question that’s been out there: Do people end up using Google?” Yu told me. “I think it ends up showing that Google’s actually done a pretty good job of not only increasing usage through AI, but also actually continuing to essentially protect and defend its market share.” AI search engines are still buzzy and are attracting interested users, but Yu said it’s important to keep their scale in perspective in terms of your overall game plan. Upstart AI chatbots, he said, generate less than 1% of referral traffic right now—and they lost market share when Google regained it. And, he added, about 50% of results on ChatGPT actually appear on the first page of Google search results. Yu said that if marketers want their brands to show up in AI search, they can’t forget about their strategies to show up in traditional search. As far as Google is concerned, he said, PageRank is similar to the algorithm used for AI search. Classic SEO focuses on building authority for topics and keywords. Google’s AI search looks for a wider variety of related keywords, as well as articles, reviews and what’s trending. Yu said that marketers should make sure that the content they want to be found both has authority and can fit logical follow-ups, as well as answer questions. Coding for schemas for structured data that had previously been used for SEO is still important, Yu said, and AI search reads that for contextual clues. “The foundation of good AI visibility is good search visibility,” he said. Another area that AI has not surpassed in terms of marketing is brands’ need to make emotional human connections with customers. I talked with branding expert and strategist Ernie Ross about how brands can develop and use authenticity in marketing. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.
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| In today’s CMO newsletter: |
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| Another huge shakeup in the media world could be in the near future. On Tuesday, media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery announced it would launch a “review of strategic alternatives to maximize shareholder value.” These could include selling the entire company, selling off either of its two major companies—Warner Bros. or Discovery Global—or going forward with its already-announced plans to split into separate entities, one for its streaming and studio assets, and the other for its global networks, including CNN, TNT Sports and Discovery. The move was likely precipitated by a rumored bid last month from Paramount Skydance to buy the company. The multibillion Paramount Skydance deal had been pending before regulators for a year, and was completed in August after the company made concessions to President Donald Trump’s priorities, including ending DEI programs and settling a controversial lawsuit filed by Trump over the editing of a campaign season interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. The rumored bid has so far not been successful, and Forbes senior contributor David Bloom writes that’s probably a good thing, considering Warner’s movie studio has not seen sweeping box office success in the recent past. Another rumored suitor is Netflix, which happened to issue its quarterly earnings report on Tuesday. Bloom writes that much of the discussion on the earnings call was about whether the streaming giant would buy the movie and cable network company. The public answer, at least at the moment, is no. “We have no interest in owning legacy media networks, so there’s no change there,” said Co-CEO Ted Sarandos. “We can be choosy.” |
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| While broadcast TV viewership is largely falling, people all over the U.S. are still tuning in for live sports. Nielsen data shows that broadcast viewership spiked 20% from September to October, the biggest one-month increase in any TV viewership since the analytics and data firm started tracking that metric in 2021. Broadcast TV made up 22.3% of all TV usage, putting it ahead of cable for the first time ever. Kicking off the sharp increase in broadcast TV viewership is the return of football. Sports viewership was responsible for a third of all broadcast viewing in September. The 15 most-watched broadcast programs of the month were NFL games shown on CBS, Fox and NBC. All of them topped August’s most watched telecast, which was also football: Ohio State vs. Texas on August 30. Broadcast TV isn’t the only medium seeing a football-related boost. The top five cable telecasts for September were all football-related: Four Monday Night Football games on ESPN, and the first international NFL game of the season on NFL Network. And Amazon Prime had its most-watched Thursday night football game ever, when the Washington Commanders lost to the Green Bay Packers on September 11. As football season continues, the viewers are likely to follow. But there’s more big sports coming to the small screen this month: On Friday, Major League Baseball’s World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays starts on Fox’s broadcast and streaming affiliates. And while baseball doesn’t always have the viewership numbers of football, Forbes senior contributor Maury Brown writes the 2025 season also had more viewers for streaming, cable and broadcast games. |
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| Singer Sophia James went viral with her attempt last week to game the TikTok algorithm—and anointed millions of users part of an exclusive club: “Group 7.” James, who acknowledged the difficulty of reaching new listeners on TikTok because of its algorithm, conducted an experiment. She posted seven videos to the platform back to back. All of them contained a snippet of her new song “So Unfair,” and each was filmed a little bit differently. The video that went viral was the seventh, and people who saw it in their streams were in “Group 7.” As of Wednesday, the “Group 7” video had 35.1 million views—while the other six only had between 1.3 million and 3.1 million views. The videos brought James more TikTok followers—about 65,000 in the last two weeks—and “So Unfair” is one of the most popular songs on TikTok. But James told the New York Times she’s no closer to understanding the way the TikTok algorithm works. Still, “Group 7” at least refers to something real—which cannot be said about the TikTok trend taking Gen Alpha by storm, “6, 7.” |
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 | | Branding strategist and author Ernie Ross. Ross | ReThink |
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| | | How Brands Build Authentic And Meaningful Relationships With Customers |
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| Ernie Ross is founder of the branding and innovation agency Ross | ReThink, and is known for his Intangience methodology, which has been taught around the globe. Ross stresses that authenticity and human connection are central to all relationships—both between people and between customers and brands. His book about these relationships—Intangience: How Human Connection Creates Value Between People, Brands and Ideologies—comes out next week. I talked to Ross about what makes a brand authentic and how it can build a relationship with customers. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. What is authenticity for a brand? Ross: In terms of branding, it has to be an authentic, meaningful relationship. You have to manifest those values, not really pouch them into 30 seconds. In the course we provide, we reference a particular commercial. We pause it after 58 seconds. We ask the audience: What is the story that’s being told? Nowhere in that 58 seconds do you see any reference to the use of the product. And then we play the last two seconds. It’s actually an ad for Dove Men’s Care, and for 58 seconds, it shows men interacting with their children. It’s a very moving commercial. To contextualize this, on the Super Bowl, it costs $[16] million for one minute. If you pause it after 58 seconds of having invested $[16] million and you were the brand manager—the agency brought this to you—to say, ‘What are you establishing here, because I’ve seen my product not used at all.’ But it was the shared intangible value that was embodied in Dove Men’s Care that connected authentically with the audience. It’s not sufficient to merely tag your logo or your message at the end. Dove Men’s Care runs a program called DadsCare, which champions things like paternity leave [and] spoke about the strength of character of a man. It was a campaign that Dove had legitimacy to run because they ran a campaign called Real Beauty, which showed women of every day as though there were models. They are examples of authentic human connection, but you have to manifest your value. It’s not an adjective, it’s an action. It’s an orientation of character that your brand must embody. We live in a world where people can assess very quickly at the click of a button what that character is in terms of that brand. How authentically they are living their message can quickly be assessed, and commented and critiqued upon. In the world of branding today, we must make sure that authenticity is not just measured by a 30-second ad or a quick soundbite, but the ways we validate that by what we do. What does a brand do to either recapture or build authenticity? Either the brand owner and/or the compliment of people that are activating the brand have to be totally subscribing to whatever that value may be. Take Coca-Cola as an example. Coke owns the happiness space and they’re very good at it, but it’s 39 grams of sugar, has no nutritional value and they don’t ever talk about flavor. So how could a beverage that says: “Taste the Feeling,” “Open Happiness, “Real Magic” own that space and manipulate it where it satisfies the craving for human connection and be an embodiment of that? I believe that authentic human connection in a brand can only live when the people genuinely subscribe to it. That is not to ignore the techniques and devices that are being used every day to make people believe that that brand is embodying those values. Coke is a perfect example, selling [1.9] billion units every day across the planet for a product that is not selling flavor, has no nutritional value. It seems like an almost impossible ask. But when you look at the techniques they use, whether it be putting names on the bottles [or] putting bottles on college campuses [that only open when] two bottles are put together, so the students begin to have an interaction that is real and brings them together. That’s Coke. What advice would you give a CMO about authenticity? Use the old adage to be true to yourself. Many times in any relationship, we lose our way for any number of reasons, and [we should be] going back to the cornerstone of the values that built that success in any relationship. Here’s an example: Suppose we were in a marriage that was not going well and you went to a counselor and they said, ‘Well, what’s wrong?’ And you say, ‘How about if we go back to what really connected us: We enjoy this particular type of activity, and we go to experience that.’ You now have the context within which you can deal with the issues, because we‘ve gone back into what we genuinely share between us. The brand relationship is the same way. What built it? What were the fundamental values that took us there? Go back to the experience where you can create that relatability that you might have lost. Because if you lose relatability, you’ve lost the basis upon which any challenge could be faced. |
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Payments and credit card provider Mastercard appointed Jill Kramer as its new chief marketing and communications officer, effective December 1. Kramer most recently worked as the chief marketing and communications officer for Accenture, and was also featured on Forbes’ 2025 list of the world’s Most Influential CMOs. She will succeed Raja Rajamannar, who is transitioning to a senior fellow role within the company.
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Healthcare technology company Solventum selected Heather Knight to be its first chief commercial officer, effective November 10. Knight previously worked as chief operating officer at Baxter International, and has also held leadership roles at Medtronic and Covidien.
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Personal injury law firm Morgan & Morgan named Tom Hafen as its new chief marketing officer, effective October 21. Hafen joins the firm from GEICO, where he most recently worked as the head of auto marketing.
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| Send us C-suite transition news at forbescsuite@forbes.com. |
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| AI is a good tool for helping create messages, from new branding slogans to your personal LinkedIn posts. However, it should be used as a helper. Working with actual people is the best way to gain reliable insights and show your authenticity. AI can also retrieve facts quickly, but what can those facts tell you? When you see a collection of facts, always ask, “So what?” And while you can ask AI, remember to work on your own interpretation as well. |
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