Myriam Jessier's Recent LinkedIn Posts

Delivering bad news: stop trying to spin your bad results. When you sugarcoat the truth, you lose credibility. Here's a 5-step framework to own the narrative instead: 1. Embrace the "Red" Don't bury the lead or minimize the loss. State the facts clearly. 2. Bad results rarely exist in isolation. Is the drop a seasonal trend? A market shift? Use data to explain the why, not to make excuses. 3. Numbers come with feelings attached. Acknowledge the disappointment. Validating frustration neutralizes the emotional impact and keeps folks on your side. 4. Focus on the learning. Transform "we failed" into "we learned X, so now we do Y."

Unapologetic cheese lover: that's me and Jono Alderson and rumor has it John Mueller is also part of the group (to be validated as internet lore or real). While cheese will be had, I'll be talking about things that I tend to share in my trainings and in my monthly Search Engine Land articles...except way more condensed, with a few tips I won't share beyond that stage. See you in September at Search Evolution Summit! Grab your ticket early.

My search results just went dim. Literally. The entire SERP went dark because of a Google Ads overlay. This is giving me "drunk guy at a conference who can't stop pitching me his vibecoded SaaS" vibes. But you know what Google Ads, you are right. I'll take you up on that. So this is an ad about the lovely Catherine Maheux-Rochette from Folks who sent me an adorable little plushie that's a limited edition version of their logo. I absolutely adore the company swag and the fact that this Canadian HR software company already handles their Google Ads. I don't need to make an ad about how if you're looking for an HR software that actually treats your employees like humans, not rows in a spreadsheet...Folks HR is an amazing option. And here is the Google Ads for funsies: Google Search Ad | Ad · www.folks.hr/ Headline 1: Maple Scented HR Software Headline 2: Ditch Rows Of Excel Sadness Headline 3: Switch to FolksHR Now Description 1: I'm the "drunk guy ad guy" now. HR folks, here's our pitch: Excel hates you; we don't. Description 2: Canadian, human-first HR. People > data points. Best swag & French/English support. Sitelink Extensions Meet Catherine our CMO Desc: The legend behind the plushie. Plan Employee Vacations Desc: Max efficiency. Happy teams. Not A Spreadsheet Desc: No pivot tables were harmed. Canadian Compliance (Eh?) Desc: We do the boring legal stuff. Unrelated but Navah Hopkins is the #1 person I follow to keep up with the ads portion of the industry. If anyone is reading this, follow them.

The "Claudy Day" attack, discovered by Oasis Security researchers, demonstrates how a trio of flaws in Anthropic’s Claude could allow an attacker to silently steal a user’s entire conversation history. For marketers handling sensitive customer data, campaign strategies, or brand secrets, this is no bueno. For SEOs, the "Claudy Day" exploit is particularly unsettling because it weaponizes the very things SEOs deal with every day: URLs, redirects, and automated content. cc Florian Schmitt, CISSP and Ties van de Ven both of you would find this interesting. https://lnkd.in/etmD2m-4

Microsoft came out with a new advertising guide all about AI search. I know this because I'm in it! This year, I bought a very good microphone so you get to hear my hot takes as clearly as you can read them. Learn from folks you already follow on LinkedIn (and if not, you should): Aleyda Solís, Lily Ray, Crystal Carter (who's got wise marketing tips and top notch life advice as well). If you want to know what's going on behind the scenes, Britney Muller and Michael King are in the front lines, guiding you. I talk about the familiarity bias but in concrete terms to make it actionable to marketers. Giulia Panozzo and I did a deep dive on the topic a while back and we keep seeing this cognitive bias pop up more and more when it comes to AI search. Here it is!

LinkedIn AI content musing: if you don't write it, you don't understand it. If it’s not worth writing yourself, it’s probably not worth reading IMO. Your "messy" original thought is the asset. AI text is a "Frankenstein’s monster" of other people's data. It's a commodity with no authorial intent.

Here's a toast to all the ladies out there who have been invited last minute or super forcefully to do something and you just know it's for international women's day and you are fed up with being a token. May the rest of the year be filled with wonderful opportunities that aren't tied to your gender because I know y'all don't do the heavy lifting at work with your lady parts. You do it with grit, with soul, with passion and with expertise.

The Microsoft Advertising team is working on some very interesting things with a lot of knowledgeable experts. I'm really happy they let me be myself and present some serious content with a serious double chin! If you want to improve your marketing in a way that machines and humans understand, take a minute to watch this. it's short, sweet and to the point. Darragh Simm, James Murray and Bertram Welink are folks who should follow if you want to learn more. I say this because I assume you're already following Navah Hopkins.

A hallucination cost a company 25 million in sales. The solar contractor Wolf River Electric dealt with Gemini hallucinations. Gemini hallucinated a non-existent lawsuit from the Attorney General. Competitors used that fake news. It snowballed from there. That's another brand drift issue. Read more about brand drift. https://lnkd.in/ekkVNtRZ Read more about this specific issue. https://lnkd.in/eGxWuawt

Executives are professional rationalizers. They are paid to remain calm. If you present a "declining trend" or a "inefficiency," their psychological immune system kicks in to explain it away ("it's seasonal," "market headwinds," "we're pivoting"). That is Region Beta and it means they most likely won't act to put a stop to the problem you tell them about.

Systems aren't about being productive; they are about surviving the information deluge. Our brains aren't made for the web. Burnout isn't a modern "hustle culture" invention. It’s a 1767 Swedish botanist problem. Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, was drowning in data before Slack existed. He had students sending him specimens from China to West Africa. His solution? The index card. He needed a way to make info portable, tactile, and reshufflable. He realized that our brains aren't meant to store data, but to arrange it. Today, the value isn't in what you know. It's in how expertly you can remix it. If you spend too much time on LinkedIn saving stuff to your bookmarks and never ever revisiting...you're doing it wrong. https://lnkd.in/ebErzsBk

Infinite memory is a prison. To grow, we must forget. Tech giants want AI to have infinite memory but high-performance intelligence requires curated erasure. "Testing showed that this time-aware system outperforms traditional memory tools in multilingual conversations by up to 14.66% in accuracy, while also avoiding redundant or outdated responses." We need tools built for revision, not just retention. If AI doesn't know how to let go, it's an anchor dragging us down.

When Google’s AI happily invents a large-for-the-price-of-a-small pizza deal, that’s AI brand drift in the wild: the gap between what you actually offer and what the machines confidently say you do. If you don’t monitor your algorithmic footprint, AI systems will define your brand for you...and not always in ways that are accurate, fair, or even commercially viable. Here's a concrete example for a restaurant. Want to know what the heck brand drift looks like if you're not a restaurant? Here's my Search Engine Land article:

Most people want a "good grade." Pros want to find the bugs, figure out what doesn't work, get better, build something worthwhile. Assume bugs. Entropy is part of the journey.

When you treat executives like children, you get superficial buy-in. The "ELI5" mindset forces you to strip away the nuance and context that leaders actually need to make decisions. It implies they aren't smart enough to handle the complexity. They are. They just lack the information you have. Instead, use the "New Hire" Mental Model. Imagine you are briefing the smartest person you know on their very first day at the company. • Respect the IQ: Assume they can process complex logic. • Fill the Gap: They don't need "dumbed down" concepts; they need history and context. • Explain the Why: 5-year-olds accept "because I said so." Executives do not. Your goal is to orient them so they can execute.

I've been noodling around with Ramon Eijkemans and not only is the article good, full of clear examples...but I'm trying to get him to create a little tool to help all of us create good bios for conferences or Search Engine Land articles. Mark Williams-Cook ask him to review your bio, I'm curious what you get (for real because I have to talk to you about something I noticed).

My brain beats an AI because it's lossy. Perfect recall isn't the target. We can only simulate the future because our past isn't fixed in stone. Forgetting is what makes imagination possible. True intelligence isn't defined by what you store, but by how efficiently you discard the noise to hone in.

The first schema update happened in 1750. And it involved a tomato. Sometimes, I think people forget that. Linnaeus invented binomial nomenclature. "Thanks to his landmark study, Systema Naturae, naturalists had a universal language, which organized the natural world into the nested hierarchies still used today". When I work on the web, I'm aware I fit into a world full of nested hierarchies. I think 2026 is going to be about cleaning up and structuring a lot of existing stuff on websites to make it clearer for humans, crawlers and AI agents.

Physics says time is a static block, not a river. Humans project "flow," but LLMs don't. To an AI, your 2017 brand disaster is happening RIGHT NOW. Stop waiting for time to heal your reputation; the machine has no clock. There is no 'fading into the past' inside a training set. Read about brand drift:

AI memory is a recursive trap. It draws on a "cached" version of you from months ago, locking you in a cocoon of familiar, safe, same...same...same. I don't want to be defined by my past biases. Growth requires letting go.