The em dash has emerged as an unlikely villain in marketing circles. According to a growing chorus of voices on Reddit and LinkedIn, this humble punctuation mark is a telltale sign of AI-generated content, prompting writers to debate whether to use the em dash at all. But is it though? Here at SALT, we’ve had internal discussions around whether we should abandon the em dash, lest our […]
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Hugo has quietly become one of the most trusted platforms for fast, lightweight websites. It is especially popular with developers and teams who care about speed, control, and clean builds. At the time of publishing, it is estimated that 14,435 websites use Hugo, which makes it a meaningful part of the modern web stack. This […]
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The future of demand generation is small, highly skilled teams using AI to achieve what once required thirty people. That’s according to Thomas Cyr, Head of Global Pipeline Generation at Shopify, who told SALT’s Reza Moaiandin on Flipping the Playbook that the discipline has transformed beyond recognition in just three years. The Flipping the Playbook […]
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Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) is widely used by enterprise eCommerce teams who need scale, flexibility, and integrations. It is often chosen for large catalogues, complex merchandising, and multi-market operations, which makes technical SEO consistency even more important. This benchmarking study, by SALT, looks at how Salesforce Commerce Cloud sites perform from a technical SEO point […]
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What do the Guinness World Records and the Michelin guide have in common? They both started life as marketing ventures – some of the very first, and most successful examples of what we call today ‘content brands’. What is a content brand? A content brand is a content initiative that supports the main brand but […]
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There is a new moment most travellers will recognise. You open an AI tool, type in a question like “Where should I go for a week in October?” or “Best places for a luxury break”, and within seconds you are given a tidy answer. A shortlist. A plan. A sense that the hard part of […]
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The role of marketing isn’t to get people to do what they don’t want to do – it’s to make it easy for prospects to buy when they’re ready. That’s the message from fractional CMO Alun Davies, who told SALT’s Reza Moaiandin on the debut episode of Flipping the Playbook that many marketers have lost […]
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Google have announced the Universal Commerce Protocol, known as UCP. It is an open standard designed to allow AI agents to handle commerce tasks on behalf of users, including product discovery, checkout, payment, and post‑purchase actions. This announcement marked an important moment for digital commerce because it moves shopping away from websites and apps and […]
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This study compares the types and structural characteristics of travel-related pages cited by two leading generative AI systems, Google’s AI Overviews and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. We looked at a dataset of 2,279 URLs cited in AI Overviews and 1,483 URLs cited in ChatGPT. Results were analysed across six travel categories: luxury, cruise, family, beach, solo, and […]
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Not long ago, searching the web felt like using a simple database index. You typed in a keyword and received a list of pages that matched, with different variables and weightings (that we knew as ranking factors). Today, search has become far more sophisticated. With AI at the core, platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and […]
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The team at SALT has carried out research into whether content structure and templates have an impact on your content surfacing in Google AI Mode. Now that Google AI Mode is available in the UK, CMOs and marketers are naturally keen to know how best to optimise their content. A quick online search will throw […]
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Introduction Everyone wants to know what they can do to increase their brand’s visibility in AI-assisted search. So, the SALT team conducted research to see if traditional SEO ranking signals had any impact on brand mentions in AI responses. AI search is disrupting traditional SEO. Success is no longer as simple as ranking on page […]
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