Company News in Brief

Oil prices rise ahead of Trump's Iran deal deadline

Global oil prices have risen ahead of a deadline set by US President Donald Trump for Iran to open the crucial Strait of Hormuz shipping route.

The price of global benchmark Brent crude was up by about 1.4% to $111.33 (£84.13) a barrel, while US-traded oil gained 2.8% to $115.61.

On Monday, Trump threatened to take out Iran "in one night" if it failed to agree a deal with the US by 20:00 Washington DC time on Tuesday (00:00GMT Wednesday).

Oil and gas shipments from the Middle East have been severely disrupted as Tehran threatens to attack vessels that try to use the strait in retaliation for US and Israeli airstrikes since 28 February.

Speaking at the White House, Trump said that he believed "reasonable" leaders in Iran were negotiating in "good faith", but that the outcome is still uncertain.

Iran has so far rejected proposals for a temporary ceasefire, demanding a permanent end to the war and the lifting of sanctions against the country.

The rise in prices today suggests investors believe it may be harder than expected for the US to reach a deal due to Iran's hardline stance and that the war could be drawn out, Ye Lin from research firm Rystad Energy said.

Meanwhile, traders are also trying to work out whether Trump actually wants a deal or if he is "just putting up a smokescreen" while preparing for a larger attack, she said.

-BBC News 

Businesses scramble to get noticed by AI search

For many businesses their website is a vital shopfront, so losing 140 million visits in a single year would be a big problem.

That's what happened to HubSpot, and the cause was AI.

The company provides sales, marketing and customer service tools for business-to-business companies.

Like many firms, HubSpot, has been hit by a crucial change in the way we search the internet.

"I remember the days when I would search [the web] and there was no good information," says Kipp Bodnar, chief marketing officer at HubSpot.

"Sometimes there was some stuff, but I had to scroll through 10, 20, 30 links.

"What you have now is access to all the world's intelligence in an instantaneous way. How people find information and subsequently take action is very, very different."

For companies like HubSpot there are several causes for the drop in traffic. Search engines rejigged their algorithms to fight AI slop, which made it more important for a website to be seen as credible on a core topic.

Users are increasingly switching from search engines to AI tools. Meanwhile, search engines themselves are including AI overviews at the top of their results and that often means that users are getting their questions answered, without having to click on to another website.

"The click-through rate for searches that have AI overviews is about 60% to 70% lower," says Bodnar.

So, companies are trying to work out how to be prominent in the answers given by AI.

Answer engine optimisation (AEO), sometimes called generative engine optimisation (GEO), is about helping websites to rank well in AI tools, including AI overviews and tools like ChatGPT.

These are built on an AI technology called large language models (LLMs).

Many companies are using AEO alongside search engine optimisation (SEO), which aims to get websites ranking in search engines.