SEO Tools and Resources

OpenAI is turning ChatGPT into more than a chatbot. The company’s latest update lets users access third-party apps (e.g., Spotify, Canva, Zillow, Expedia) directly inside conversations. Why we care. This shift could make ChatGPT a high-intent marketing channel, reaching 800 million users where they’re already engaging – in chat. How it works. Users can call apps by name (“Figma, turn this sketch into a diagram”) or ChatGPT can suggest them automatically based on context – like surfacing Booking.com when discussing travel. Apps act like actions, not separate tools, within ChatGPT’s conversational flow. OpenAI calls this a step toward a “conversational opera…

ChatGPT started mentioning more brands and websites over the past three months, while Google’s AI Mode narrowed its focus, according to new data from Semrush’s AI Visibility Index. Reddit, in particular, stood out: it dropped sharply as a source in ChatGPT but became one of the most frequently used sources in Google’s AI Mode. The big picture. ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode are changing in different ways. ChatGPT is experimenting more while Google’s AI Mode seems more stable: ChatGPT mentioned about 12% more brands in September, then dropped back in October, suggesting it’s experimenting with answers. Google’s mentions fell 4% over the same period, suggesti…

ChatGPT citations favor pages that rank well, match the query in their headings, and stay tightly focused, according to an AirOps study of 16,851 queries. The top retrieval result was cited 58% of the time, and pages that answered the main query more narrowly outperformed broader, more comprehensive guides. Why we care. This study clarifies how to earn ChatGPT citations: win retrieval, mirror the query in your headings, and answer one question extremely well. In this study, that mattered more than breadth. The findings. Retrieval rank was the strongest signal. Pages in the top search position were cited 58.4% of the time, versus 14.2% for pages in position 10. …

ChatGPT ecommerce traffic converted 31% higher than non-branded organic search across 94 ecommerce sites in 2025, but it still drove a small share of revenue. That’s based on a 12-month GA4 analysis by Visibility Labs covering January through December 2025. Why we care. This data shows that AI referral traffic converts at a higher rate than traditional non-branded search traffic, but the volume remains small. This signals emerging value, not a replacement channel. Higher conversion rate. ChatGPT traffic converted at 1.81% vs. 1.39% for non-branded organic (31% higher). It outperformed organic in 10 of 12 months. Visibility Labs attributes the higher rate to i…

OpenAI now allows users of ChatGPT to share their device location so that ChatGPT can know more precisely where the user is and serve better answers and results based on that location. The feature is called location sharing, OpenAI wrote, “Sharing your device location is completely optional and off until you choose to enable it. You can update device location sharing in Settings > Data Controls at any time.” What it does. If ChatGPT knows your location, it can return better local results. OpenAI wrote: “Precise location means ChatGPT can use your device’s specific location, such as an exact address, to provide more tailored results.” “For example, if y…

Education, technology, and software development websites have gotten a referral traffic boost from ChatGPT search – and ChatGPT sent more traffic to more than 30,000 unique domains by November. That’s according to new Semrush (disclosure: Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush) analysis of 80 million lines of global clickstream data from the second half of 2024. Search behavior changes. ChatGPT answered about 54% of queries with search turned off, with the remaining 46% of queries using search. The average ChatGPT prompt length was 23 words, with a high of 2,712 words. The average ChatGPT search length was much lower – just 4.2 words, with a high of 301 w…

Just six weeks after launching its ad pilot, OpenAI has hit a significant milestone — and the platform is still in its early stages of rollout. The numbers. Over $100 million in annualized ad revenue, generated from less than 20% of eligible US free and Go tier users seeing ads daily Around 85% of Free and Go users are eligible to see ads — meaning the current revenue represents a fraction of the platform’s eventual ad capacity More than 600 advertisers are now on the platform What’s coming next. Self-serve advertiser access is on track to launch in April Geographic expansion into Canada, Australia, and New Zealand is being explored OpenAI ha…

ChatGPT is currently down for many users of the popular OpenAI service. When you try to ask ChatGPT a question, you likely won’t get a response. OpenAI confirmed the issue on its status page saying, “We’re currently experiencing issues.” OpenAI added, “We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation.” What it looks like. Many are seeing just a black dot as a response to their questions within the ChatGPT interface: Offline for many. The OpenAI status screen shows the uptime by service: Downdetector shows the service has been reported as offline by thousands o…

ChatGPT performs a search in nearly one-third of prompts and averages more than two searches per query, each about 5.5 words long (roughly 60% longer than the typical Google search), according to a new study from marketing agency Nectiv. Why it matters: ChatGPT isn’t just answering questions – it’s searching like a power user. The model relies on longer, more specific, and more commercial-style queries than Google’s average searcher. That means SEOs could have more influence over ChatGPT’s answers, especially for local, product, and buying-intent searches where the model leans most heavily on external data. By the numbers. Some key findings from the report: S…

ChatGPT can now personalize searches using your memories. Memory with Search is a new addition to ChatGPT search, and was quietly added as an update in its changelog. What is Memory with Search. ChatGPT said it can “use memories to inform search queries when ChatGPT searches the web using their-party search providers.” Not a lot of detail there. But OpenAI’s ChatGPT search page offers more information: ‘If you have ‘Memory’ enabled, when ChatGPT search rewrites your prompt into a search query it may also leverage relevant information from memories to make the query better and more useful. For example, if the user has ‘Memory’ turned on and asks ChatGPT …

AI citations in ChatGPT are far more concentrated than citation distributions in traditional search. Roughly 30 domains capture 67% of citations within a topic. That’s according to Kevin Indig’s latest study, which also found that broad topical coverage, long-form pages, and cluster-based models outperform the old “one keyword, one page” approach. The details. Citation visibility wasn’t evenly distributed. In product comparison topics, the top 10 domains accounted for 46% of citations; the top 30, 67%. AI visibility was slightly less concentrated than classic organic search, but still highly centralized. Indig’s conclusion: you’re effectively shut out u…

OpenAI’s ChatGPT search had 41.3 million average monthly users across the EU between October and March. That’s nearly 4x growth from the prior six-month stretch, when it reported having 11.2 million users. Why we care. Brands and businesses need to understand how (or whether) their content is being surfaced in AI-generated responses. ChatGPT search is nowhere near replacing Google Search, but it is an emerging channel for visibility and discoverability. What ChatGPT reported. According to OpenAI’s EU Digital Services Act (DSA) page: “For the six-month period ending 31 March 2025, ChatGPT search had in combination approximately 41.3 million average monthly act…

AI-powered search is moving fast. The latest shift? ChatGPT Shopping. Since April, OpenAI has been rolling out a shopping experience that surfaces product cards directly inside ChatGPT. Instead of sending users to a long list of search results, the interface now provides curated recommendations with images, labels, and “buy” links. For ecommerce SEOs, this is a new channel with very different rules. Placement isn’t driven by ads or bids, at least not yet. Instead, visibility depends on the quality of product data, structured markup, and external signals like reviews and mentions. The implications are significant. Results are condensed to just a handf…

Could ChatGPT launch an advertising product within the next year? The answer seems to be yes, based on internal OpenAI documents. OpenAI appears to forecast a billion dollars in new revenue from “free user monetization” in 2026. That figure is forecast to grow to nearly $25 billion by 2029 of OpenAI’s total $125 billion projection. The chart. Here’s a chart (shared by Juan González Villa on X) of OpenAI’s projection of rising revenues that includes “new products (including free user monetization).” Yes, that means ads: Why we care. ChatGPT has an estimated 600 million monthly users. The ability for advertisers to reach ChatGPT’s users represents a signif…

ChatGPT referral traffic converts worse than Google search, email and affiliate links, trailing on both conversion rate and revenue per session, according to a new analysis of 973 ecommerce sites. Why we care. AI search platforms are starting to refer meaningful traffic to retailers – but not yet sales. For now, Google (paid organic) search still wins on conversion and revenue per session. By the numbers. The dataset consisted of 12 months (Augusut 2024 to July 2025), 973 ecommerce sites, and $20 billion combined revenue. ChatGPT referral traffic was ~0.2% of total sessions – ~200× smaller than Google organic. >90% of LLM-originating ecommerce traffic …

In the last 24 hours, ChatGPT and Perplexity have introduced new AI-driven shopping experiences that aim to deliver more personalized product discovery and guidance. Both experiences are meant to help users find, compare, and purchase products through conversational queries informed by preferences and past behavior. ChatGPT Shopping research. OpenAI introduced shopping research, a guided buying experience that turns ChatGPT into a personalized product researcher. Users describe what they need (e.g., “quiet cordless vacuum,” “compare these strollers,” “gift for my art-obsessed niece”). ChatGPT asks clarifying questions, pulls price/spec/review data from the…

Chloe Varnfield, a digital marketing specialist at Atelier Studios with nearly eight years in PPC, joined me to share the mistakes that shaped her career — and the lessons every advertiser should take from them. When Google sneaks settings past you Chloe’s first story centers on Google’s account-level automated assets setting — a feature so well hidden that many advertisers don’t know it exists until a client sends a screenshot asking why their headline looks completely wrong. The setting, buried behind a three-dot menu, defaults to on, meaning Google can automatically generate and serve headlines advertisers never wrote or approved. The takeaway: always audit your…

Every business needs an online presence. Building a business website could be one of your most important decisions. But after that decision comes another question: Which platform should you choose to build your business site on? This depends on what kind of website you need, your resources, and your expertise. Table of contents Define your website’s purpose Do you have technical expertise and resources? Types of website platforms Scalability, customization, and security Budget and cost considerations Additional considerations and support Deciding on the business site platform Now, choose a platform for your business website Define your website’s purpose B…

Key Takeaways Choosing an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO impacts your online presence and future growth. Yoast offers reliability with over 15 years of experience and millions of active installations, unlike newer competitors. Innovations such as AI integration and a unified schema graph set Yoast apart from other plugins. Yoast provides comprehensive support, education, and a multi-platform ecosystem tailored for long-term success. Trust industry leaders like Microsoft and Spotify who use Yoast SEO to enhance their online visibility. Estimated reading time: 11 minutes Table of contents What really matters when choosing an SEO plugin Why legacy and pr…

Despite all the shiny new capabilities at our disposal, many professionals seem stuck in a cycle of “AI Groundhog Day.” You open a chat window, carefully craft a prompt, paste in your context, and get a great result. An hour later, you do it all over again. If this is how you use AI to automate, you’re still doing manual work — you’re just doing it in a chat box. To move from using AI to building with it, you need to shift from a human doer to a true human orchestrator. That means stopping one-off prompts and starting to build systems. In this new phase of AI automation, what you really need are AI skills. I explore this shift in my new book, “The AI Amplifie…

Claude Sonnet 3.7 is the top-performing large language model (LLM) – it outperforms competitors like Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and X’s Grok. That’s according to SEO agency Previsible’s new AI SEO Benchmark report. By the numbers. Claude Sonnet 3.7 “performed the best across the board,” earning an 83% score. But that score fell short against human SEOs (who scored 89%). LLMs averaged: 85% on content tasks. 79% on technical SEO. 63% on ecommerce SEO. Here’s how the other language models scored: Perplexity: 82% Gemini 2.5: 81% ChatGPT 4o: 79% ChatGPT o3-mini: 78% Copilot: 78% Deepseek: 78% Gemini 2.0 Flash: 71% Llama 4: 7…

Google has long been considered the gold standard for ad spend compared to social platforms. But scale doesn’t equal immunity. Click fraud remains a persistent risk, and the safety of your budget depends entirely on where your ads are running. While Google Ads offers immense reach, its campaigns aren’t created equal. Some are significantly more exposed to malicious activity than others. To protect your margins, you must understand what constitutes click fraud, where it originates, and how to shield your campaigns. What are invalid clicks? Invalid clicks are interactions that lack legitimate consumer intent. Because they aren’t driven by real human interest, the…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is upending the economic engine of the web, and Google is at the center of the disruption, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. What Prince said. In a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Prince said: “AI is going to fundamentally change the business model of the web. The business model of the web for the last 15 years has been search… search drives everything that happens online.” The Google tipping point. Google’s value exchange with content creators has collapsed, Prince said: “Ten years ago… for every two pages of a website that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. … That was the trad…

AI bots could outnumber humans on the web by 2027, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, as agent-driven browsing explodes alongside generative AI adoption. Prince made the prediction at SXSW, warning that bots are already reshaping how the internet is used — and how it’s monetized. Why we care. Search is shifting from human clicks to AI-generated answers. If bots become the web’s primary “users,” you’ll need to reshape your strategy to ensure AI systems can access, trust, and use your content. The details. Prince said AI agents generate far more web activity than humans because they gather information differently. A person shopping might visit five sit…

Cloudflare today announced a new feature that allows you signal via robots.txt whether your content can be used in Google’s AI Overviews (as well as for AI training). Cloudflare’s new Content Signals Policy is meant to give publishers more control over how crawlers and bots use their data, beyond traditional directives that only regulate crawling and indexing. How it works. The policy adds three new machine-readable directives to robots.txt: search: permission for building a search index and showing links/snippets (traditional search). ai-input: permission to use content as input for AI-generated answers. ai-train: permission to use content for traini…