NMS Editorial Team

NMS Editorial Team

ChatGPT Just Became a Local Search Engine. Nobody Has a Playbook for That Yet.

On March 26, OpenAI added a toggle to ChatGPT. Settings, Data Controls, Location Sharing, off by default. Five days later, local search might have a second major player for the first time in a decade. And almost nobody in local SEO is talking about it. What the Toggle Actually Does

Pop art illustration of Meta Ads Manager with a glowing natural language text input replacing traditional dropdown targeting menus

Meta Wants You to Describe Your Audience in Plain English. That Is Not a Convenience Feature.

Meta rolled out a text box. That's the most reductive way to describe what happened. Inside Advantage+ targeting, there's now a tab called "Describe Your Audience" where you type a plain-English description of who you want to reach. Up to 2,000 characters. Meta&

Allbirds Just Sold for $39 Million. They Raised $270 Million in Their IPO. What Every DTC Brand Should Learn From the Wreckage.

On Monday, Allbirds announced it's selling everything to American Exchange Group for $39 million. The brand, the intellectual property, the remaining inventory. All of it. This is the same company that closed its first day of trading in November 2021 at a $4 billion market cap. The same

Pop art illustration of CTV screens showing static and warning signals with bold colors and Ben-Day dots

CTV Ad Fraud in 2026: A Media Buyer's Audit Guide

Connected TV advertising is forecast to hit roughly $38 billion in US spend this year. That makes it the fastest-growing video channel by a comfortable margin. It also makes it the most attractive target for fraud operators since early programmatic display. Here's what I find genuinely unsettling: depending

Allbirds: What Went Wrong From $4 Billion to $39 Million

In November 2021, two footwear companies went public within weeks of each other. Allbirds opened on the Nasdaq at a $4.1 billion valuation. On Running debuted on the NYSE at roughly $7.3 billion. Both were venture-backed. Both sold premium sneakers. Both had sustainability narratives. Five years later, On

Blueprint-style diagram of AI search traffic flows from Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT to websites with varying stream widths

Gemini vs Perplexity Traffic: Raw Clicks vs. Real Value

Gemini Flipped the Traffic Scoreboard in Four Months In August 2025, Perplexity was sending roughly three times more referral traffic to websites than Google Gemini. By January 2026, Gemini had overtaken it, sending 29% more visitors globally and 41% more in the United States. That reversal happened in about four

Crowd of people staring at glowing AI screens on phones and laptops with skeptical expressions

More People Are Using AI. Fewer People Trust It. Marketers Should Pay Attention to the Gap.

A Quinnipiac University poll published this week found that 73% of Americans have now used an AI tool, up from 67% a year ago. At the same time, 76% say they trust AI-generated results rarely or only sometimes. Only 21% trust them most of the time. Those two numbers moving