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NMS Editorial Team

NMS Editorial Team

Isometric illustration of an FTC building seal beside a stack of strategic plan documents, a marketing funnel with warning labels, and a gavel over a keyboard.

The FTC's 5-Year Plan Reads Like a Marketing Audit. Most Teams Won't Notice.

The FTC spent two weeks telling everyone it was going to stop burdening legitimate business. Chairman Andrew Ferguson restored the phrase "without unduly burdening legitimate business activity" to the agency's mission statement and framed the whole rewrite as a course correction from overregulation. Then on April

OkCupid's 12-Year Cover-Up Ended With Zero Fines and a 20-Year Leash

The FTC settled with Match Group and OkCupid on March 30 over a 2014 photo transfer the dating app spent twelve years trying to keep quiet. Nearly three million user photos went to Clarifai, a facial recognition startup. No money changed hands. No user was told. And the order the

Blueprint-style diagram of the Googleplex with twenty sealed envelopes and a workbook marked 26 pages, cyan line art on dark blue

Google's Publisher Summit Was a Pacification Tactic Disguised as an Apology

On October 29, 2024, Google flew twenty independent publishers to the Googleplex in Mountain View. Danny Sullivan, the company's Search Liaison, ran the meeting. The attendees were sites that had been crushed by the Helpful Content Update and the core updates that followed. They brought data. They brought

Blueprint technical illustration of a robots.txt file as a no-trespassing sign at a chain link fence with AI crawler bots walking around it.

Yahoo Got Cited 30,000 Times by AI While Blocking Google's Crawler

Yahoo's robots.txt explicitly disallows Google-Extended, the crawler Google created so publishers could opt out of Gemini training without losing search visibility. By the standard logic of every "block AI bots" guide written in the last two years, that should keep Yahoo content out of AI

Pop art illustration of a Google AI Mode product panel showing a sponsored stores ad label above organic retailer listings with Gap chinos at $29

Sponsored Stores Hit Google AI Mode (and Organic Links Landed on Top)

Search analyst Glenn Gabe flagged it on X last Wednesday afternoon: a "Sponsored Stores" unit sitting inside a Google AI Mode product detail panel, right above the organic "All stores" block. A day later, Search Engine Roundtable wrote it up. Google, as of this morning, has

Dark data visualization showing three data streams converging into a single glowing API endpoint with lock icons

Google's Data Manager API Consolidated Three Pipelines Into One Dependency

Google's official pitch for the Data Manager API: “one centralized, secure connection so advertisers can easily get the most out of Google AI for their campaigns.” That sentence contains three value propositions and exactly zero mentions of what it replaces or why the old thing had to die.

Isometric illustration of a campaign brief transforming into a digital media plan with connected DSP channels and a stopwatch

Basis Compass Does in Five Minutes What Media Planners Bill Eight Hours For

The part of media buying that everyone assumed was safe from AI wasn't the bidding. Bidding has been automated for years. It wasn't the targeting, either. Lookalike audiences and algorithmic expansion already turned most manual audience selection into a polite suggestion the platform quietly overrides. The