NMS Editorial Team

NMS Editorial Team

Blueprint-style diagram with five AEO tactics crossed out beside a Google developer docs page: llms.txt, content chunking, AI rewrites, mention farms, and special schema.

Google's First AEO Guide Says Skip llms.txt, Chunking, and AI Schema

Google published its first official guide to optimizing for generative AI search on May 15, 2026, and explicitly framed AEO and GEO as repackaged SEO rather than separate disciplines. The mythbusting section names five tactics to ignore: llms.txt files, content chunking, AI-specific writing, inauthentic mentions, and special schema markup.

Pop-art split panel of three ChatGPT chat screens with ad cards labeled 0%, 1.15%, and 2.4% CTR, dotted halftone background, three operator silhouettes.

The Cleanest Brand in r/PPC's ChatGPT Ads Test Drew 0% CTR

Three U.S. media buyers compared notes on r/PPC this week after running ChatGPT Ads beta campaigns through April and early May 2026, and the click-through rates landed at 0%, 1.15%, and 2.4%. The cleanest brand drew zero. Format, creative, and category fit moved performance further than

Blueprint diagram of an AI content factory feeding Google's index, with a red threshold line marking where the scaled-content classifier trips and pages get deindexed.

r/SEO's 1,800-Posts-a-Month Thread Maps Where Google's Classifier Trips

An r/SEO thread titled "Is there any way to make 1,800 posts per month work" drew 101 comments on May 15, 2026, and almost none of them defended the premise. The thread is the clearest signal yet that practitioners have stopped debating whether scaled AI content

Dark navy data dashboard showing a 52-week customer LTV cohort chart with a large 83% iROAS flip callout, representing Albertsons Media Collective's framework

Albertsons Added LTV After Its Own iROAS Audit Flipped 83% of Scores

Albertsons Media Collective added projected lifetime value as a core measurement metric on May 15, 2026, segmenting brand cohorts across a 52-week window. The framework validates within roughly 15% of historical campaign outcomes and follows an internal audit, run with Ovative and Northwestern's Kellogg School, where iROAS values

Meta Lookalikes in 2026: Where They Still Beat Advantage+ and Where They Do Not

Meta lookalike audiences still exist in 2026, but their role has narrowed sharply. Meta's own help docs now point advertisers to Advantage+ audience as the default, and accounts running Sales, Leads, or App Promotion objectives can no longer remove audience suggestions, meaning delivery expands past the lookalike anyway.

Photo collage of a creator video podcast mic, broken measurement ruler and scattered attribution charts marking Amazon Wondery's TV-upfront measurement gap

Wondery's Revenue Lead Walked Back Amazon's TV-Replacement Podcast Pitch

Amazon pitched creator video podcasts like New Heights and Armchair Expert as the next TV network at its 2026 Upfront on May 11. Four days later, Wondery's head of revenue Angie More told Digiday that fixing measurement is a multi-year project, naming attribution across non-owned platforms as the

Dark data dashboard contrasting a rising GMV line with a flat owner take-home, surrounded by Shopify net margin benchmarks by store revenue tier for 2026.

25% of Shopify Stores Never Reach Profit. GMV Is What Hides the Math.

Only 5 to 10% of Shopify stores ever reach what analysts call real, sustained profit, and roughly 25% of active stores never get there at all. For stores under $100K in annual revenue, the median net margin sits at about 2%. The fix starts with auditing COGS, ad payback windows,