The Weekly Bulletin | February 3, 2026

Catch up on your members' content, check out the community buzz, and browse through job opportunities

Author

Vahe Arabian
February 03, 2026

Hi SODP community,

Let's recap on what's been happening, the new content, industry updates, tips, and more.

.TIP OF THE WEEK.

Beyond Rankings: The Content Formats AI Search Can't Replace

AI summaries are killing commodity content, but not everything.

The content that’s still winning shares one thing in common: its value can’t be extracted without user action, context, or participation.

Based on what’s actually working right now, here are the alternatives publishers should be paying attention to 👇 :

  1. Interactive experiences

    Quizzes, assessments, configurators, calculators. Not because they’re “engaging,” but because the value doesn’t exist until the user interacts. AI can explain. It can’t do the work for you.

  2. Systems of record, not explanations

    Benchmarks, trackers, live datasets, market maps, and regulatory updates. These aren’t “how things work” pages. They’re where people check reality repeatedly. Freshness + ownership beats optimisation.

  3. Decision-support content

    Comparison engines, trade-off visualisers, prioritisation frameworks. AI can list options. It can’t resolve your constraints. When the stakes are real, users still click.

  4. Video that shows proof, not opinions

    Walkthroughs, demos, process recordings. AI can summarise text. It can’t replicate visual evidence, trust, or human presence.

  5. Participation-driven content

    Communities, discussions, user contributions. The value isn’t the information; it’s the interaction. And it keeps growing after publication.

The shift isn’t: “How do we rank?” It’s: “What value only exists after someone clicks?”

The brands winning in AI search aren’t producing more content. They’re building experiences, systems, and infrastructure that can’t be summarised away.

Curious what formats others are seeing work right now.

.NEWS OF THE WEEK.

➡️ The Shift from Search Sessions to Decision Sessions. This one started with a question from Adorján-Csaba Demeter, a subscriber in Romania, who asked how big the behavior change could be after Google’s AI Mode Personal Search launch, and it pushed me to think past the product announcement and into the habit shift underneath it. AI changing search is a foregone conclusion. The real story is what happens to people when search stops acting like a library and starts acting like a helper that knows what you meant, what you like, and what you have coming up next. When effort drops, behavior changes first. Then business models change. Then the web scrambles to catch up.

➡️A running list of publisher lawsuits targeting Google’s ad tech practices. The U.S. Justice Department’s ruling against Google for monopolizing digital advertising markets has opened the door for publishers to seek compensation for claimed lost revenue. Last April, the court ruled that Google violated U.S. antitrust laws by monopolizing the markets for publisher ad servers – with DoubleClick for Publishers (rebranded to Google Ad Manager in 2018) – and ad exchanges – via AdX – by tying the products together. The trial now moves toward remedies. Several major U.S. publishers have filed lawsuits against Google in New York City, claiming that the tech giant’s dominance over ad servers and exchanges made it difficult for publishers to use other platforms, and kept prices for publisher inventory low.

➡️ Firefox hands you the AI kill switch you've been asking for. Mozilla last week integrated centralized AI controls into Firefox 148, scheduled for release February 24, addressing mounting user demands for granular control over artificial intelligence features. According to Mozilla's February 2 announcement by Ajit Varma, the new controls provide a single location within desktop browser settings to block current and future generative AI capabilities while maintaining options for users who want specific features enabled. The timing reflects broader industry tensions over mandatory AI integration.

➡️ LinkedIn Shares What Works For AI Search Visibility. LinkedIn published findings from its internal testing on what drives visibility in AI-generated search results. The company, reportedly among the most-cited sources in AI responses, shared what worked for improving its presence in LLMs and AI Overviews. For practitioners adjusting to AI search, this is a rare look at what a heavily-cited source tested and measured. In a blog post, Inna Meklin, Director of Digital Marketing at LinkedIn, and Cassie Dell, Group Manager, Organic Growth at LinkedIn, detailed the tactics that got results.

➡️ The Trust Stack: LLM Inputs – What Can We Push?. The current situation we are in was artfully describe by the hero robot from the 80’s classic Short Circuit. Johnny 5 was sentient robot who’s catch phrase was: “Need More Input“! Does that not sound exactly like the current attitude of our favorite LLMs? I mean only yesterday we talked about Anthropics’ efforts to buy and scan as many books as possible. These LLM beasts have veracious unquenchable appetites. That hunger is not just for raw data, but for data it can built up it’s foundation on: I call it: “The Trust Stack”. So that in turn brings us to todays look at INPUTS!

.SODP POSTS.

Down-ranking Polarizing Content Lowers Emotional Temperature on Social Media – New Research

Reducing the visibility of polarizing content in social media feeds can measurably lower partisan animosity. To come up with this finding, my colleagues and I developed a method that let us alter the ranking of people’s feeds, previously something only the social media companies could do.

Reranking social media feeds to reduce exposure to posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity affected people’s emotions and their views of people with opposing political views.

I’m a computer scientist who studies social computing, artificial intelligence and the web. Because only social media platforms can modify their algorithms, we developed and released an open-source web tool that allowed us to rerank the feeds of consenting participants on X, formerly Twitter, in real time.

Drawing on social science theory, we used a large language model to identify posts likely to polarize people, such as those advocating political violence or calling for the imprisonment of members of the opposing party. These posts were not removed; they were simply ranked lower, requiring users to scroll further to see them. This reduced the number of those posts users saw.

.JOB BOARD.

➡️ The European Correspondent (Europe) looking for a new business specialist / strategic partnership manager who can help grow their revenue, build meaningful collaborations, and be the driving force behind building strategic, mission-aligned partnerships that support their journalism and expand their impact. (Europe).

➡️ The Telegraph (U.K) is seeking an experienced and dynamic Executive Producer & Editor to be the driving force of The Daily T, their fast-growing flagship news podcast, who will also be a substantial leader within the newsroom, providing a significant voice at news conferences and editorial discussions. (U.K)

➡️ Fox News Digital (U.S) is seeking an experienced Part-Time Freelance Reporter, US and Crime to join their team, who is a seasoned journalist with years of experience in a major newsroom with vast experience in U.S. news coverage, and has a wide range of sources with the ability to break news and dig in on original and exclusive reporting. (Remote, U.S)

.SOCIAL MEDIA.

➡️ Sharad Yadav on LinkedIn:

Prebid’s announcement taking stewardship of the open-source AdCP-based Sales Agent (now Prebid Sales Agent) is a major and exciting step for the open web.

By bringing sell-side agent infrastructure into the Prebid open-source ecosystem, publishers gain a practical and credible path to agentic advertising. This a familiar home for many with much bigger vision.

This direction strongly validates the work we’ve been doing at Bidcliq.

Since the launch of AdCP, it has been clear, as Brian articulated so well that the real constraint in premium advertising isn’t demand, it’s human bandwidth and this needs to focus on strategy while agents do the underlying effort.

Agentic systems change the economics by lowering friction, making smaller, premium deals viable, and allowing publishers to scale revenue without scaling headcount.

That thesis has been a foundational input into how we’ve shaped Bidcliq’s product and architecture from day one.

We are building an integrated programmatic + agentic wrapper designed to help publishers:

  1. Deploy sales agents quickly

  2. Operate agentic and programmatic buying side by side

  3. Apply policy, review, and guardrails around autonomous execution

  4. Scale premium revenue without need to scaling sales teams

These are the highlights for the last week.

Until next!

Vahe Arabian and the editorial team at SODP