Diggity Marketing News Roundup – April 2026
Catch up on all the biggest stories in online marketing in this latest edition of our roundup covering late March and beyond. You’ll get fresh news from SEO and AI to PPC, social media, and video marketing. In the top stories from last month, you’ll learn about the outcome of the last big core and spam updates. You’ll also get an analysis of how AI is killing Google ads, and an expert’s breakdown of how one piece of video marketing content was engineered to earn over $200,000. Next, you’ll learn about Google’s alleged “crackdown” on SEO, and a veteran SEO’s take on what he would do if he had to start all over again, and what you can do about Google’s dead call button. In the final stories of the month, what testers are learning about budgeting AI ad campaigns, and how to take advantage of a social media strategy no one is using. Google March 2026 Core & Spam Update, AI-Generated Title Links, Bing AI Reports Update & Much More https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rggEKDGA3AM Barry Schwartz brings you this quick review of some sudden Google updates that landed late last month. The Core Update and the Spam update struck around the same time. The core update (the first of 2026) took 2 weeks and is now complete. The spam update was over the day after it launched in April. Barry takes you through the updates and what we know now. Google identified this update as “a regular update designed to surface better, relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.” As with the last few core updates, Google didn’t issue new guidance, but given the size of the impact, many site owners may wish they had made changes. The updates sent ripples everywhere. It shifted nearly 80% of the top-three results, and 1/4th of all top-10 pages fell out of the top 100. It’s not yet clear which update is most responsible for all the changes, as analysis continues. Barry also covers news that Google is using AI to generate title links in SERPs. This experiment shocked and angered some publishers because Google went so far as to change the headlines of news stories. Barry covers how this evolved from earlier practices, and what’s changed now. Check out the complete guide for more takes from Barry about other changes to Google, including new citation tests for AI overviews, new ad APIs, changes for merchants, and more. Next, some experienced ad pros have opinions on what AI is doing for Google Ads and your team. AI Is Killing Google Ads (And Saving Your Sales Team) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKCXBlnHg6o Lawrence Mackey brings you this interview with Dan Butcher about how AI is killing Google Ads. The interview, more broadly, focuses on how ad teams handle channel management, and there’s a great discussion on that leading into the talk on AI. Exploring how channel management has changed in recent years, the host and guest touch on the concepts of demand generation (creating interest when nobody’s searching) and demand capture (converting existing intent). Both agree that Google remains the lowest-hanging fruit for demand capture because even after AI and other changes, it still converts at a much higher rate than channels like Meta, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, or Google. That isn’t to say they don’t think the changes to ads have been significant. They explore a lot of what people mean when they say Google is “killing ads.” They discuss the potential of Ad automation, how AI may be scaled, and how the organic component of marketing may become more valuable when the market is flooded with AI-enabled fake storefronts. Watch the complete video to get some additional practical advice on taking advantage of AI, including how an AI appointment setter via SMS can boost contact rates and book calls even when your team is offline. Next, learn what it takes to build video content worth hundreds of thousands in value. Social Media Expert: I Made $200k With One Video (Steal This Viral strategy!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncqgnK5vMkY Bandman Kevo brings you this interview with IG influencer RealMelaninKing on his explosive growth using video content. In the video, the guest discusses how the brand was built and expanded from 2 million followers in just 2 years to 6 million followers across all of social media. After reflecting on his past and journey into influencing, RealMelaninKing goes into how he first started developing the viral content that made him a success. He had an early talent for Instagram videos and achieved his first $10,000 month only 6 months after starting. He takes the audience through the thought process he uses to build content. He argues that competitor research should always be your priority and explains how he uses LLMs and other tools to conduct early research. He reminds you to explore which viral format your competitors are using to get attention. They go on to discuss how the “trust deficit” is affecting how social media audiences engage with content. The guest reveals how he’s seen audiences develop a greater hunger for background information, testimonials, and proof of expertise, and how he builds content that adapts to that. Check out the full video to learn more about the small changes RealMelaninKing makes to videos that help them go from thousands of views to millions. Next, Lily Ray thinks your SEO strategy doesn’t work. Is she right? Lily Ray Reveals SEO Truths in 2026: What Works Now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pUMNtq8Bp0 Joy Hawkins brings you this interview with Lily Ray covering Google’s increasingly aggressive crackdowns, carried out through site penalties, core updates, and more. She has some thoughts on what’s happening and on how to recover. Over the course of a wide-ranging interview, they explore what Google is really targeting based on the evidence. Lily Ray draws on a long history of diving into the data to identify the most risky practices, such as creating city pages in locations where your business has no presence. The conversation naturally veers to what is working right now, including the rewards of investing your time and budget elsewhere. Joy and Lily talk about Google alternatives that interest them and their SEO teams right now, including Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, Threads, and other ecosystems that offer authentic connections and can improve SEO in the long run. They also dig into what’s really been happening with the core updates. Lily identifies several interesting trends, including the increasing likelihood of “aftershocks” that occur after the update is reported as finished. She also tracks the massive amount of movement in the healthcare niche and trends that may signal Google’s internal conflict over the role of user-generated content. They discuss other interesting trends, such as the surprising visibility of Facebook groups and the increasingly iron-clad rankings of .gov sites over competitors. Check out the complete video to learn more about why GBP stays safe, the crackdown on listicles, the new war on AI-generated reviews, and more. Coming up next, a long-time SEO lays out how he’d start over from nothing, knowing what he knows now. SEO in 2026: How I’d Rank in Google in the AI Era https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiW6xRYSXmM Sam Oh feels like he finally has some answers on how SEO behaves in the AI era. He’s using those answers to present a theory on how you can move forward, starting from the assumption that you have nothing. He identifies some key shifts. First, he argues, AI is increasingly learning to be like us when it comes to sources. That means it gathers sources from across the web, citing public information, forum posts, and videos to create a well-supported answer. Another big shift, according to Sam, is that brand is everything now. It’s not always worth the effort to get attention from Google by writing for Google (even if it’s good, it will get stolen by search features). Instead, you need to work on making your brand impossible to ignore. He also talks about where traditional SEO still wins because organic clicks are increasingly flowing to action-oriented results. AI can explain concepts, Sam points out, but it cannot complete the task. Queries like a backlink checker, a mortgage calculator, or a snow removal service need a single click. Check out the complete video to learn more about fresh ranking strategies and where they’re likely to do the most good. Next up, Google’s call button is now dead, but marketing strategies that rely on phone booking still have options. Google’s call button is DEAD, do THIS instead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVoeAlO-dhE Caleb Ulku brings you these ideas for replacing the Google call button. As he reminds you, Google recently rolled out a new update that removes the call button from all organic map results. The button is not fully removed, but it has been isolated to our profile page and cannot be seen from SERPs. This is not an error or an isolated incident, Caleb argues, but part of a pattern by Google to take greater control of searcher-to-business interactions. The missing call button isn’t Read More Read More
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