One charmingly consistent quirk of survey research is that people overstate their importance.  This Citrix study of CIOs is an extreme case in point: two-thirds of respondents say the CIO is second only to the CEO in terms of delivering business strategy, and nearly as many expect tech leaders to be largely or entirely responsible for marketing, sales, customer experience, employee experience, talent recruitment, financial performance and pretty much everything else in the next five years.  Silly CIOs: we all know that newsletter editors are really in charge.

BrightEdge reports that, despite huge growth, AI search engines still provide less than 1% of website referral traffic. You might think that’s a reason to ignore your ranking in AI search engines, but BrightEdge argues those rankings are still important because the main role of AI search is discovery, not referrals. Seems like a testable hypothesis. What we know for certain is that over-all traffic has dropped as users switch from traffic-generating traditional search to traffic-stifling AI search engines.