Hey Reader,
There’s a LOT happening this week 👀
- We’re celebrating Crystal Carter’s first book 🎉
- Two AI search events are coming up (online & IRL!)
- 8 new roles are waiting for your applications
- Our new content adaptation series begins thanks to Weglot!
Thank you to this week's WTSNewsletter sponsors & WTSPartner features: AirOps, Peec AI & withFrontier
Let's get started =)
Brilliant work by our brilliant members
1) Helene Jelenc - Search Visibility Index: 2026 Landscape for HR & Work-Tech SaaS
2) Laura Iancu - Attention, Crawl, Render: The 3 Budgets Shaping Every Architecture Decision
3) Orit Mutznik - Can AI Agents Complete Tasks on Your Site? My Agentic Search Readiness Audit Framework
4) Miriam Ellis - How Keywords in Business Names Currently Impact Google Local Pack Rank and AI Search
5) Preeti Gupta - I Looked at Buffer’s SEO, AI, and Onboarding, and Here’s What I Found
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If you’d like to recommend resources for future editions (& yes, please recommend your own work!), fill out this form:
A new conversation on how high-growth marketing teams operate
[Headline Sponsor: AirOps]
Marketing leaders are under increasing pressure to deliver more: higher pipeline targets, changing buyer behavior, and limited resources. But the teams growing fastest right now are operating under a very different set of conditions.
That's why we're sharing an upcoming conversation for marketing leaders: The New Rules of Growth.
Krithika S. was the first marketing hire at Stripe and at OpenAI, building both marketing functions from the ground up. She now leads marketing at Thrive Capital, working with founders across the portfolio on growth. She's joined by Christy Roach, CMO at AirOps, who has held marketing leadership roles at AssemblyAI, Airtable, Asana, and Gusto. Together, they're veterans of high-growth culture, having been early employees at companies like Stripe, OpenAI, Asana, Gusto, and Airtable.
On September 17 at 10am PT / 1pm ET, they'll break down results from the Marketing Leaders Reality Index and discuss how high-growth teams are changing the way they:
- Hire and design their teams
- Allocate budget and resources
- Prioritize initiatives
- Measure success and report performance
- Make the case for additional budget and headcount
- Operate with greater leverage as growth demands increase
Go deeper into the operating principles that set high-growth teams apart, and what you can apply to your own team to accelerate growth and secure more resourcing.
The webinar is free!
Last chance to join us in Philly this year!
The countdown is officially on.
In just over three weeks, 200+ SEOs and marketers will be in one room, sharing ideas, asking questions, making new connections & learning from some of the smartest folks in search.
Whether you're coming to sharpen your AI search strategy, level up your technical SEO, rethink your content approach, or simply spend a day surrounded by people who get what you do, we'd love to see YOU there.
You belong here.
Limited final call tix left before we sell out!
[Webinar] How AI search finds, validates, & cites expertise
Less than a week to go until our next WTSTalk with Francesca Belmer
You don't have to be everything to everyone (& when it comes to AI Search - that's not what it wants from you either).
Francesca Belmer nearly talked herself out of delivering this session because she isn’t a day-to-day SEO practitioner.
Then she realised that trying to sound like something she's not would undermine the very story she wanted to tell.
Brands do it too: agencies list every possible service, websites make broad claims & content teams cover more topics in the hope that greater breadth will create greater visibility.
When Francesca recently explored 17 million AI citation data points & consumer research, she found revealing patterns in the sources AI search cites—& how much of that process brands can influence.
86% of AI citations come from sources brands can influence.
Join us live on Tuesday 15th September at 4pm BST (11am EDT) to hear Francesca discuss the data, her findings, what you should be doing, & answer your questions in a Q&A at the end.
🗽 WTS x Peec AI: NYC Meetup
[WTSPartner Feature: Peec AI]
Join us at Peec AI’s NYC office to meet other WTSers navigating the changes in search and hear what Peec AI’s data is showing...
We’ll discuss what SEOs should prioritise, what may be getting more attention than it deserves & how AI-visibility data can inform real decisions. You’ll also hear what it’s like to work at an AI-search startup and how SEO skills translate into emerging roles.
📅 Tuesday 22 September, 6:30-8:30pm ET
📍 New York
Register to view the full address! 👇🏽
Built an AI workflow that didn't work the first time?
You're not the only one.
AI can automate repetitive work, but building reliable workflows usually takes more trial and error than people admit.
Suzanne Kolpakov shares three AI workflows she now relies on every day, covering competitive intelligence, product updates, and knowledge management. More importantly, she explains what broke while building them, how she fixed it, and the lessons she learned along the way.
The New Rules of AI Search
[Spotlight Feature: Crystal Carter]
HUGE congratulations to WTSer Crystal Carter on the release of her first book, The New Rules of AI Search: SEO for Visibility in ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Generative Search! 🎉
If you’ve followed Crystal’s work over the past few years, you’ll know she’s been at the forefront of AI search, sharing practical research, testing & insights long before it became one of the industry’s biggest topics.
Crystal's book covers:
- Practical ways to improve your visibility in AI search.
- How to create content that AI tools can better understand and recommend.
- Simple frameworks for measuring and improving your AI visibility.
- Actionable advice you can start applying straight away, whether you’re an SEO, marketer, or business owner.
We're so proud of Crystal for this huge achievement and we've loved seeing her book in the hands of so many WTSers already!
Could you be our After Party sponsor for Philly?
Join us at WTSFest
WTSFest - your SEO & digital marketing conference designed with intention
October 1st 2026
Philadelphia, USA
NOW: $699 final call tix
➡️ Selling out soon!
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March 19th 2027
London, UK
NOW: £399 +VAT
➡️ Early bird just dropped!
NEXT: £599 +VAT when gone!
|
8 global open job roles just for YOU
[Jobs Sponsor: withFrontier]
🇬🇧 SEO Manager - Sneaker & Streetwear
📍 London (Hybrid)
💰 £47,000-£60,000 + perks
🇬🇧 SEO Account Director
📍 Fully remote (UK)
💰 Up to £60,000 + bonus
🇬🇧 SEO Account Director - eCommerce Search Agency
📍 London, Sheffield or Newcastle (1 day/week)
💰 £50,000 + equity + profit share
🇬🇧 Senior Paid Media Consultant
📍 London (Hybrid)
💰 £42,000-£48,000
🇺🇸 VP of eCommerce & Growth
📍 Miami (Hybrid)
💰 $150,000-$200,000 + bonuses
🇺🇸 Organic Growth Strategist - B2B SaaS
📍 Fully remote (US)
💰 Salary not specified
🇺🇸 Client Success Manager - Performance Agency
📍 Fully remote (US)
💰 Up to $90,000-$95,000
🇦🇪 SEO & PPC Account Manager
📍 Dubai
💰 AED 15,000-22,000/month
[WTSNewsletter Series] How to Adapt Your Content for Different Markets
Series description:
Translation is what gets your content into another language, but localization is what makes it work there. The difference shows up in search and AI visibility, conversion rates, insights from local teams, and whether your customers feel like you’re talking to them or talking at them.
In this series Rayne will explore:
- Why your content adaptation strategy needs to go beyond translation
- Cultural content adaptation considerations, & organizational alignment
- How AI changes what’s possible (and what it can’t replace)
Series Author: Rayne Aguilar
Rayne manages all things content, communications, and SEO at Weglot, an AI website translation tool. She’s from the other side of the world, which is either great branding for a multilingual company or a convenient excuse to shorten the commute for pain au chocolat.
Part 1: Why Your Content Adaptation Strategy Needs to Go Beyond Translation & Where to Begin
Translation, localization, and transcreation are three different levels of content adaptation. Applying the wrong one to a piece of content is a common reason that international content strategies underperform:
- Translation produces the closest accurate rendering of your source text in a target language. It’s technically correct, but with no adaptation for cultural context.
- Localization starts from the translated text and adapts it for the target market by adjusting register and tone, replacing idioms that don’t transfer, adding culturally specific references, correcting date formats and currencies, and reconsidering whether any imagery and references used convey the same meaning.
- Transcreation is about emotional and creative intent. Rather than adapting from the source, you rebuild it. This is vital when your content depends on resonance rather than information. Taglines, campaign concepts, and brand manifestos are typically transcreation jobs.
In DeepL’s state of localization research, almost everyone polled reported a positive Return On Investment (ROI) from localization, with the majority seeing a return of three times or more. In my experience, most of this ROI lives in the gap between translating and localizing content.
The decision about whether translation, localization, or transcreation is the best approach to apply comes down to the purpose of the content you’re adapting. For instance, functional copy (such as UI strings, product descriptions, or help documentation) is typically a localization job. Marketing and brand content, where tone and emotional register carry commercial weight, is an ideal candidate for transcreation.
How should you approach this work?
Step One: Start by Documenting What Is and Isn’t Going to Change
Your brand’s values and what it stands for, the personality traits that define how you communicate, and terminology or product naming decisions typically don’t change.
For other elements, you have greater scope to adapt the content:
- Register (either formal or informal address), depending on what the market expects.
- Humor, idiom, and culturally specific references.
- Imagery and visual choices that carry different associations by market.
- Seasonal campaign timing that’s aligned to local cultural calendars (for example, you want to avoid things like targeting Australian customers with "summer campaigns" in July, because for them, July is the dead of winter)
Kim Reyes, Head of Creative at finance company Qonto sat down with us on the Weglot Next Market Live podcast to talk about how content adaptation is managed in her organization through shared tone of voice principles.
During the chat, she said:
“…How do I make sure that I’m adapting to the right culture and the situation, but still staying authentically myself? That’s the core of the question as a brand: how do you stay authentically you, knowing that language is perceived differently in different parts of the world?…”
– Kim Reyes, Head of Creative, Qonto
Qonto operates across Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. But the register they use (formal versus informal) varies from market to market. In Germany and France, Qonto determined that the formal register was most appropriate to use, because in these markets that signals credibility and trust. However, in Italy and Spain, a formal register would be perceived as cold, rather than authoritative; and so the informal register is used.
Tone of voice documentation is an important first step, but it doesn’t end there. If the principles that exist in documentation aren’t embedded in the teams responsible for the adaptation work, you’ll quickly find that your brand sounds different in every market.
In part two of this series I’ll cover how to approach market-level expression, cultural considerations, and ensuring your organization is fully aligned.
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