Communications Spent 20 Years Optimizing for Google. The Next Fight Is in robots.txt.

By Ronn Torossian The communications industry spent two decades getting good at search. We learned how Google ranked pages, how it weighed links, how it read a site. We built entire practices around it. That skill set is now depreciating in real time, and most agencies have not noticed where the new fight is. It... Read More

AI in Marketing, Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Guest Column

Generative Engine Optimization Reshapes PR

May 19, 2026

The Condé Nast CEO Told the Truth About Search. PR Should Listen Hardest.

A year ago, Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch told his teams to plan as if search traffic is zero. This week he repeated it on a national broadcast, and told the Financial Times that Google search is “no longer a meaningful driver” of traffic to his properties. Lynch is a visionary — and not because... Read More

AI in Marketing, Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Guest Column

May 15, 2026

Share of AI Voice: The Media Metric That Will Define the Next Decade of Brand Building

For thirty years, the media and marketing industries have measured brand impact through a consistent family of metrics. Reach. Frequency. Impressions. Share of voice. These metrics assumed a model of consumer attention in which a person saw an ad, read an article, or scanned a search result — and then, somewhere downstream, made a decision... Read More

AI Agent, AI Core Technologies

Guest Column

AI Visibility Is Reshaping B2B SaaS Buying

May 14, 2026

B2B Software Just Crossed the Line From Google-First to ChatGPT-First Buying

When 5W’s tech practice was helping B2B SaaS companies fifteen years ago, the marketing math was simple. Rank on Google. Capture demo requests. Move them into a sales-qualified funnel. Nurture through email. Close. The channels were known. The attribution was imperfect but measurable. If you had a clean SEO operation and a clean paid search operation, you... Read More

AI Assistant, Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Guest Column

May 14, 2026

Don’t Hire the Booers: What Every CEO Needs to Know About the UCF Class of 2026

Ronn Torossian, Founder & Chairman, 5W A new 99-point gap in American AI sentiment is going to sort your communications and marketing workforce faster than any technology in 20 years. The UCF commencement video tells you exactly what to screen for — and exactly what to screen out. I have hired thousands of public relations... Read More

Insights, Insights and Reports

Guest Column

Ransomware Resilience Demands Zero Trust

May 13, 2026

International Anti-Ransomware Day Commentary

By Anthony Daniel, Managing Director, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, WatchGuard Technologies Every year, Anti-Ransomware Day arrives with the same familiar advice: patch your systems, back up your data, and train your employees. Those fundamentals still matter, but ransomware has evolved far beyond opportunistic attacks and phishing emails. Today’s attackers operate more patiently... Read More

AI Agent, Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Guest Column

May 5, 2026

From clicks to conversations: how AI Is reshaping website success metrics

By : Helena Rebane, CEO of AddSearch For more than two decades, the success of a website was measured using a familiar set of metrics: traffic, clicks, bounce rate, and time on page. Essentially, more traffic doing more things over a longer period. Yet today, across multiple sectors, web traffic is falling. Behaviors are clearly... Read More

AI Automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Guest Column