An Instagram repost is an action that allows accounts to reshare other accounts’ content. Reposts then appear on the main feed with an icon showing the account that reshared the content.

For brands, reposts typically involve sharing user-generated content (UGC) such as customer photos, videos, reviews, or Stories where the brand has been tagged. This allows businesses to amplify authentic customer voices while maintaining an active, engaging feed.

What are the benefits of reposting capabilities on Instagram?

For business accounts, there are many benefits that can be taken from incorporating reposts into a content strategy. Utilising user-generated content helps evidence real customers, rather than relying solely on brand claims. It brings visibility to the real people and stories behind a product or service.

Brands become more credible when they highlight genuine customer interactions and experiences. Reposts also demonstrate that a business listens to and values its audience, showing engagement with its customer community in an unedited, honest way.

Additional benefits include:

• Increased trust and credibility, as potential customers are more likely to trust peer recommendations than branded messaging alone.
• Stronger community building, because reposting makes customers feel recognised and appreciated, encouraging further engagement.
• Cost-effective content creation, as user-generated content supplements branded content without the need for additional production.
• Improved reach and discoverability, since reposts can introduce brands to new audiences via the original creator’s followers.

How to utilise reposts to demonstrate reliability and build trust

To effectively use reposts as a trust-building tool, brands should be intentional and strategic rather than resharing content at random.

Prioritise authentic customer experiences
Focus on reposting content that shows real-life use of your product or service. Testimonials, before-and-after results, behind-the-scenes moments, or candid reviews help potential customers visualise themselves having the same experience.

Maintain brand consistency
While reposts should feel authentic, they should still align with your brand values and visual identity. Adding subtle branded elements, captions, or context helps keep your feed cohesive without over-editing the original content.

Showcase a variety of voices
Reposting content from different customers highlights consistency and reliability. A mix of demographics, use cases, and formats such as Reels, Stories, and posts reinforces that positive experiences are not one-off occurrences.

Add social context through captions
Use captions to reinforce trust signals. Briefly explain the customer story, highlight outcomes, or quote feedback directly. This adds credibility and clarity while keeping the focus on the customer.

Engage and give credit
Always tag and credit the original creator. This transparency not only builds goodwill but also reinforces authenticity and ethical social media practices.

When used consistently, Instagram reposts become more than just shared content. They act as powerful social proof. By amplifying genuine customer voices, brands can build trust, demonstrate reliability, and create stronger emotional connections with their audience.

When looking at raw data for the first time, it can be extremely overwhelming. On YouTube Studio, there are so many different metrics, reports, and time frames to choose from and knowing how to understand which data to pick to tell a story is extremely difficult. In this article, we’ll discuss several key reports in YouTube Studio and what they can tell you about your content, how it’s performing and how you can improve it. 

Channel Performance

Channel Performance is one of the most fundamental reports on YouTube Studio, letting you see key metrics such as views, watch time, subscribers and revenue. If you want a basic understanding of how your channel is performing without getting into the nitty-gritty of data analytics, your channel analytics report is your main priority. These are your main metrics because views and watch time decide whether ot not your channel is successful enough or not to be monetised, which requires 1000 subscribers and 4,0000 watch hours in the past 12 months.

Audience Retention

The audience retention report lets you see how long people have been engaging with the videos on your channel. This is important because some of your content may be long-form and some may be short-form. Typically, short-form videos will generally have a higher audience retention due to their nature of requiring less time to watch. Analysing some of your longer-form content, how long it is being watched for, and different points of the video at which viewers are dropping off, is helpful in understanding if creating this type of content is working for you or if you need to change up the length or timings on your videos to keep people engaged and what works for you. The more people engage with your videos, the more likely they are to be pushed by the algorithm, so having content that is too long or making people lose interest will likely make your channel stand still.

Traffic Sources

The traffic sources report can be a very great analytical tool when diving deeper into how your YouTube channel is performing. Traffic Sources let you know how all your different viewers are finding you. This is important because by understanding how your viewers are finding you, you will know how to find them, or other areas you need to improve. For example, if over 60% of your traffic is coming to your YouTube channel externally from Google, it is important that you maintain a high level fo SEO on your videos including titles, thumbnails, descriptions, tags and more to keep appearing in google search, while understanding thatgrowing your channel in this way will eventually help to gain more traffic through YouTube search.

What this means for marketers

While reports such as channel performance allow for an overview of performance, marketers who want to make a deep dive into more nuanced areas of performance, extracting data to make educated decisions on selected videos, can do so by looking at different, more in-depth reports such as audience retention, traffic sources and more to improve performance over time.

Reports recently surfaced claiming that Google plans to introduce advertising into its Gemini AI chatbot in 2026. For marketers, this immediately raised questions about how Google might monetise AI, and how ads could appear inside conversational tools. Google has since pushed back on those claims.

According to the company, there are currently no ads in Gemini and no confirmed plans to add them.

The speculation began with a report suggesting Google had briefed advertisers on future plans to place ads inside Gemini. If true, this would mark a significant shift, transforming Gemini into a new advertising surface, similar to Search or YouTube.

Given Google’s advertising-first business model, the idea wasn’t hard to believe. AI tools are expensive to run, and marketers are watching closely to see where paid placements may appear next.

What has Google said in response?

Google responded quickly and publicly. Dan Taylor, Google’s Vice President of Global Ads, stated that the report was based on inaccurate information and anonymous sources. He confirmed that Gemini is ad-free today and stated that there are no plans to introduce ads.

Google’s Ads Liaison team backed up that message, reinforcing the company’s stance and aiming to calm concerns across the industry.

Ads are appearing in other AI Experiences

While Gemini itself remains ad-free, Google is already experimenting with ads in other AI-powered areas. Ads currently appear in AI Overviews within Search, and Google has acknowledged testing advertising in its AI Mode.

From a marketing perspective, this matters. It shows Google is actively exploring how ads can fit into AI experiences, just not directly inside Gemini, at least for now.

What should we take from this?

For now, Gemini isn’t an advertising channel. But the bigger picture hasn’t changed. Google is clearly testing where AI and advertising intersect.

Marketers should expect AI-driven ad formats to continue expanding across Search and beyond. Even if Gemini stays ad-free in 2026, the conversation signals what’s coming next, and why staying informed is essential.

As Google continues to integrate generative AI into search, advertisers are learning that familiar rules don’t always apply in new environments. One of the latest clarifications from Google Ads confirms that exact match keywords are not eligible to trigger ads within AI Overviews. While subtle on the surface, this shift has meaningful implications for how campaigns are structured and how brands show up in high-visibility search moments.

Understanding Google’s Update on Exact Match

Google recently confirmed that even if an advertiser is bidding on an exact match keyword identical to a user’s query, that keyword alone will not make an ad eligible to appear within an AI Overview. These AI-generated summaries are designed to respond to broader, more conversational intent, not precision keyword matching.

This marks a departure from how many advertisers traditionally think about control and relevance. Exact match still plays an important role in standard search results, but AI Overviews operate under a different logic, one driven by machine learning and inferred intent.

Why AI Overviews Favour Broader Targeting

AI Overviews are built to answer complex, exploratory questions. To do that effectively, Google relies on broad match keywords and AI-powered campaign types that give its systems flexibility to interpret meaning rather than syntax.

This doesn’t mean Google is removing advertiser control. Instead, control shifts from rigid keyword matching to smarter signals including conversion data, audience behaviour, and strong negative keyword strategies. Advertisers who lean into this approach are better positioned to access AI-driven placements.

What Marketers Should Do Next

For clients, this shift highlights an important evolution in how search works. User behaviour is becoming more intent-driven and conversational, particularly within AI-powered results. Brands that approach this change cautiously but proactively are better positioned to appear where attention is increasingly concentrated within AI-generated answers at the top of the page. By evolving keyword strategy in a controlled, data-led way, advertisers can safeguard results today while preparing for the future of paid search.

As we look back on 2025, it has been a year defined by learning, growth and reflection. Like any business journey, there have been challenges along the way, but these moments have helped shape our approach and strengthen the way we work. More importantly, the year has been filled with opportunities, progress and achievements that have moved the business forward and supported the work we deliver for our clients.

Throughout the year, our team has celebrated a wide range of successes, from personal milestones to collective achievements. Each win, no matter the size, has contributed to the momentum of the business and reinforced our focus on delivering thoughtful, effective marketing solutions.

We launch our PPC services

One of the standout developments of the year was the launch of our PPC services. Our co-director, Liam, took a bold step in early 2025 by expanding his skill set and introducing a new offering for our clients. This addition has allowed us to provide more comprehensive and well-rounded marketing support, helping clients optimise their campaigns and achieve stronger results. Expanding into PPC has strengthened our ability to support growth and deliver joined-up strategies.

Matthew passes his apprenticeship with flying colours

Another proud moment came when our SEO executive, Matty, completed his multichannel marketing apprenticeship with an impressive first. This achievement is a testament to his hard work, dedication and commitment to developing his expertise. His success reflects the value we place on continuous learning and professional development within the team.

Becoming finalists in the Yorkshire Post Business Awards

In September, we were honoured to be nominated as finalists for the Yorkshire Post Micro Business of the Year award. The evening at the Royal Armouries was a chance to celebrate alongside some of Yorkshire’s most inspiring businesses. While we did not take home the award, the experience itself felt like a win and a moment of genuine pride for the team.

Celebrating Together: A Festive Team Experience
As the year drew to a close, we took some time to celebrate together outside the office. Our team headed to Manchester for a live Crystal Maze experience, tackling physical and mental challenges together. The day was a testament to the collaborative spirit and strong team relationships we’ve built throughout the year. It was a fun and memorable way to wrap up 2025, reinforcing how much we value connection, support and shared achievement.

A thank you to our clients

None of the progress we’ve made in 2025 would be possible without the trust and collaboration of our clients. Working alongside such passionate and ambitious businesses has been a constant source of motivation for our team. Each partnership has challenged us to think smarter, be more creative and deliver meaningful results. As we look ahead to 2026, we’re excited to continue building these relationships, supporting our clients’ growth and achieving even more together.

Looking ahead

As we move into the next year, we carry forward the lessons, confidence and motivation gained in 2025. We are excited to continue building on this momentum, supporting our clients and creating even more reasons to celebrate in the year ahead.

Search engine optimisation is evolving rapidly as AI-driven search experiences become more common. Can users use the same SEO techniques in AI Mode as in normal search to be successful? In this article, we will discuss all relevant SEO techniques for AI mode.

How Users Search in AI Mode

AI-powered search engines no longer rely on simple keyword matching. Instead, they use queries conversationally, analysing user intent. This means content needs to answer real questions clearly and naturally. Pages written for humans, with logical structure and depth, are more likely to be selected or referenced in AI-generated responses than those built purely around keyword repetition.

Technical SEO in AI Mode

While a lot of SEO techniques may not be relevant in AI Mode, Technical SEO is still important. Ensuring your site is easily crawlable for AI bots means it is easier for them to understand and evaluate your content, making you more likely to appear in AI-generated responses.

How to be successful in AI Mode

AI mode often delivers answers directly within the search experience, which changes how SEO success is measured. Rankings and clicks still matter, but being cited or referenced within AI-generated responses becomes a key outcome. This elevates the importance of brand authority, topical consistency, and content credibility across the web.

What Google says about SEO in AI Mode

Google’s Robby Stein named five factors Google uses to judge content within AI Mode, which Roger Monti has written about extensively in his article for Search Engine Journal. The five factors include quality, helpfulness, and real user satisfaction, driving visibility. AI Mode evaluates whether people find the information genuinely useful and use engagement signals and user behaviour to rank content, much like in traditional SEO.

What this means for Marketers

SEO in AI mode reinforces what we already know about SEO, content that helps users win. By focusing on the audience websites align naturally with AI and help to create engaging content for audiences that boost traffic and profitability.

In early December 2025, Google announced a new core update to its search ranking system. The update began on 11 December 2025 and is expected to take up to three weeks to fully roll out. Core updates affect how websites appear in search results globally and can cause noticeable changes in visibility and traffic.

This December update is the third major core update of 2025, following earlier updates earlier in the year. Like previous updates, it applies broadly across industries rather than targeting one specific type of website or content.

Google has described this update as a routine improvement designed to show more useful and relevant results for people using search.

What a core update actually means

A core update is a wide-ranging change to how Google evaluates content. It does not penalise individual websites and it is not aimed at specific tactics. Instead, Google adjusts how it judges relevance, usefulness and quality across the web.

As a result, some websites may see rankings improve while others may drop, even if nothing has changed on the site itself. These shifts are a normal part of how search evolves.

What marketers should expect

During the rollout period, it is common to see rankings and traffic fluctuate. Search performance can feel unstable until the update has fully completed and the results settle.

The main things marketing teams may notice include:

• movement in keyword rankings across important pages
• changes in organic traffic without any clear on-site cause
• short-term volatility that smooths out after rollout ends

Longer term, core updates tend to reward content that is clearly written, genuinely helpful and closely aligned with what people are actually searching for.

What to do if performance drops

Google’s guidance remains consistent. There is no single fix or quick action required if rankings decline during a core update.

Instead, teams should take a measured approach. That means reviewing content quality, checking whether pages answer user questions clearly, and ensuring the overall experience on key pages is strong. Overreacting during the rollout phase often causes more harm than good.

Monitoring trends over weeks rather than days gives a much clearer picture of whether changes are temporary or part of a longer shift.

The bigger picture

Core updates like this are part of Google’s ongoing effort to improve search results. They will continue to happen regularly and will continue to create winners and losers in the short term.

For non-technical marketing teams, the most important takeaway is consistency. Brands that focus on clear messaging, useful content and genuine value for users tend to be more resilient when these updates roll out.

Big changes are coming for advertisers targeting audiences in the European Union. Meta has announced that Facebook and Instagram users will soon have more control over the ads they see, giving marketers and brands a chance to rethink how they approach EU campaigns. The move comes as Meta works to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is designed to ensure users have a real choice over how their personal data is used.

The New User Choice

Starting in January 2026, EU users will be presented with two clear options for ad experiences. They can either continue with fully personalised, data-driven ads the type most marketers rely on for precision targeting, to switch to a limited personalised option, which uses less data while keeping the platforms free to use. This replaces Meta’s previous “consent or pay” model, which regulators argued didn’t offer a genuine choice. For users, this change means greater transparency and control, while still accessing the social platforms they love.

Impact on Advertising Strategies

For advertisers, this change signals a shift in how campaigns may perform in the EU. Users choosing the limited personalised option will generate less granular behavioural data, which could impact targeting precision and campaign performance. Brands will need to lean more on contextual targeting, broader audience strategies, and creative messaging to maintain results. While it may add complexity, it’s also an opportunity to innovate and connect with audiences in fresh, privacy-conscious ways.

Looking Ahead

This update marks a significant step in the EU’s privacy-first approach to digital marketing. For marketers, staying ahead of these changes means adapting campaigns, testing new strategies, and embracing the evolving balance between user choice and ad performance. Those who do so successfully will not only comply with regulations but also build stronger, trust-based connections with their audiences. The landscape is changing, but with the right approach, brands can thrive.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO is the practice of using undesirable techniques in order to boost the SEO performance of a website. This can include, but is not limited t,o keyword stuffing, hidden links, paid backlinks and more. Google’s algorithms have found a way to penalise sites using different Black Hat SEO tactics, while promoting sites that use White Hat SEO techniques such as creating quality content and focusing on user experience. However, there are certain individuals who will always be trying to trick search engines to artificially boost their rankings. In this article, we will look into new Black Hat SEO techniques that have emerged in 2025 and why you should steer clear of them.

How does Black Hat SEO work in 2025?

The main black hat SEO technique that has become prevalent in 2025 is AI poisoning. This is when users purposefully feed information to chatbots that is wrong or misleading in order to damage a brand’s reputation or offering. Up until now, it was believed that it would take a large amount of data to manipulate AI responses, as they have already been trained to their current understanding on vast amounts of data. However, a recent study from Anthropic shows that only a small amount (as few as 250) malicious documents can cause this Black Hat SEO technique to take effect on the user’s desired Large Language Model.

Here’s what the study had to say,

“Poisoning attacks can compromise the safety of large language models (LLMs) by injecting malicious documents into their training data. Existing work has studied pretraining poisoning, assuming adversaries control a percentage of the training corpus. However, for large models, even small percentages translate to impractically large amounts of data. This work demonstrates for the first time that poisoning attacks instead require a near-constant number of documents regardless of dataset size. We conduct the largest pretraining poisoning experiments to date, pretraining models from 600M to 13B parameters on chinchilla-optimal datasets (6B to 260B tokens). We find that 250 poisoned documents similarly compromise models across all model and dataset sizes, despite the largest models training on more than 20 times more clean data. We also run smaller-scale experiments to ablate factors that could influence attack success, including broader ratios of poisoned to clean data and non-random distributions of poisoned samples. Finally, we demonstrate the same dynamics for poisoning during fine-tuning. Altogether, our results suggest that injecting backdoors through data poisoning may be easier for large models than previously believed, as the number of poisons required does not scale up with model size, highlighting the need for more research on defences to mitigate this risk in future models.”

What this means for SEOs

Obviously, it goes without saying that manipulating large language models to try and gain some sort of edge on your competitors is not an encouraging technique, as not only is it self-serving, but it can also come back to be a negative for you as well. Firstly, if people start manipulating large language models on a large scale purely for selfish reasons, then these models will become largely unusable and have to be retrained, which is bad for everyone in the industry ultimately. Secondly, if Google starts penalising people who have been manipulating large language models and feeding them ill information, your site could be heavily penalised or, worse, altogether restricted from appearing on Google. As ever, making sure you follow Google’s guidelines and best practices when enhancing your site and its seo performance, while creating quality content, is the best and most surefire way to beat out your competitors in 2025.

Well, we’ve successfully tallied another year of brilliant celebrations as a team, this time making our way over to Manchester to enjoy the festivities! Taking the team back to an intensely nostalgic environment, The Crystal Maze live experience.

Fuelling the day’s activities

We kicked things off exactly as any great day should—with an incredible meal at Society Manchester. This vibrant food hall delivered a buzzing, festive atmosphere, paired with an impressive line-up of food traders offering cuisines from all corners of the globe.

The team wasted no time getting stuck in, tucking into irresistibly sweet and tangy hoisin bao buns before moving on to freshly prepared tinga tacos. Each dish delivered an explosion of flavour, keeping energy levels high and appetites fully satisfied before we shifted gears and prepared ourselves for some serious gaming ahead.

Let the games begin

With spirits high, we arrived at the Crystal Maze and immediately embraced the competitive energy in the air. Greeted and hyped up by the incredible game actors, the team was ready and raring to go as we entered the medieval zone to begin the challenge.

Our abilities were well and truly put to the test, with tasks designed to evaluate our knowledge, skills, and physical capabilities—alongside challenges layered with mystery and problem-solving. Without giving too much away for future participants, the experience proved to be an outstanding team-bonding exercise that had everyone fully engaged from start to finish.

We’re proud to say we emerged from the Crystal Maze dome with an impressive 78 points, sitting a solid 13 points above the average group score—despite securing just six crystals along the way.

Cheers to another exceptional year

We carried our Crystal Maze victory forward to the ever-popular Mulligans, where the team enjoyed a well-earned pint of Guinness, followed by some dancing to a fantastic live band. Once again, everyone had the chance to fully immerse themselves in an atmosphere filled with laughter, celebration, and well-deserved relaxation.

Our Christmas party always serves as a moment to reflect on the year gone by—a year defined by achievements, client wins, and challenges successfully overcome together as a team. This celebration was no exception, rounding off another exceptional year for Intelligency in the best possible way.