SEO Tools and Resources

Google has released the February 2026 Discover core update, this is a core update specific to how Google surfaces content within Google Discover. Google wrote, “This is a broad update to our systems that surface articles in Discover.” This is first rolling out to English language users in the US, and will expand it to all countries and languages in the months ahead, Google said. What is expected. Google said the Discover update will improve the Google Discover “experience in a few key ways,” including: Showing users more locally relevant content from websites based in their country Reducing sensational content and clickbait in Discover Showing more i…

Most PPC teams still build campaigns the same way: pull a keyword list, set match types, and organize ad groups around search terms. It’s muscle memory. But Google’s auction no longer works that way. Search now behaves more like a conversation than a lookup. In AI Mode, users ask follow-up questions and refine what they’re trying to solve. AI Overviews reason through an answer first, then determine which ads support that answer. In Google Ads, the auction isn’t triggered by a keyword anymore – it’s triggered by inferred intent. If you’re still structuring campaigns around exact and phrase match, you’re planning for a system that no longer exists. The new f…

Google Search is entering an “expansionary moment” driven by longer queries, more follow-up questions, and growing use of voice and images. That’s according to Alphabet’s executives who spoke on last night’s Q4 earnings call. In other words: Google Search is evolving into AI-driven experiences where conversations increasingly happen inside Google’s own interfaces. Why we care. AI in Google Search is no longer an experiment. It is a structural change that is altering user behavior and is reshaping discovery, visibility, and traffic across the web. By the numbers. Alphabet’s Q4 advertising revenue totaled $82.284 billion, up 13.5% from $72.461 billion 2024: …

AI is no longer an experimental layer in search. It’s actively mediating how customers discover, evaluate, and choose local businesses, increasingly without a traditional search interaction. The real risk is data stagnation. As AI systems act on local data for users, brands that fail to adapt risk declining visibility, data inconsistencies, and loss of control over how locations are represented across AI surfaces. Learn how AI is changing local search and what you can do to stay visible in this new landscape. How AI search is different from traditional search We are experiencing a platform shift where machine inference, not database retrieval, drives d…

Right now, it’s hard to find a marketing conversation that doesn’t include two letters: AI. SEOs, strategists, and marketing leaders everywhere are asking the same question in different ways: How do we use AI to cut manpower, streamline work, move faster, and boost efficiency? Much of that thinking makes sense. If you run a business, you can’t ignore a tool that turns hours of grunt work into minutes. You’d be foolish to try. But we’re spending too much time asking, “Can AI do this?” and not enough time asking, “Should AI do this?” Once the initial excitement fades, some uncomfortable questions show up. If every title tag, meta description, land…

As AI-driven bidding and automation transform paid media, first-party data has become the most powerful lever advertisers control. In this conversation with Search Engine Land, Julie Warneke, founder and CEO of Found Search Marketing, explained why first-party data now underpins profitable advertising — no matter how Google’s position on third-party cookies evolves. What first-party data really is — and isn’t First-party data is customer information that an advertiser owns directly, usually housed in a CRM. It includes: Lead details. Purchase history. Revenue. Customer value collected through websites, forms, or physical locations. It doesn’…

Google Ads has quietly rolled out multi-party approval, a security feature that requires a second administrator to approve certain high-risk account actions. These include adding or removing users and changing user roles. Why we care. As ad accounts grow larger — and more valuable — access control has become a bigger risk. A single unauthorized, malicious or accidental account change can disrupt campaigns, access, and billing in minutes. Multi-party approval reduces that risk by requiring a second admin sign-off on high-impact actions, adding protection without changing day-to-day campaign management. For agencies and large teams especially, it helps prevent cost…

In 2015, PPC was a game of direct control. You told Google exactly which keywords to target, set manual bids at the keyword level, and capped spend with a daily budget. If you were good with spreadsheets and understood match types, you could build and manage 30,000-keyword accounts all day long. Those days are gone. In 2026, platform automation is no longer a helpful assistant. It’s the primary driver of performance. Fighting that reality is a losing battle. Automation has leveled the playing field and, in many cases, given PPC marketers back their time. But staying effective now requires a different skill set: understanding how automated systems learn and h…

Anthropic is drawing the line against advertising in AI chatbots. Claude will remain ad-free, the company said, even as rival AI platforms experiment with sponsored messages and branded placements inside conversations. Ads inside AI chats would erode trust, warp incentives, and clash with how people actually use assistants like Claude (for work, problem-solving, and sensitive topics), Anthropic said in a new blog post. Why we care. Anthropic’s position removes Claude, and its user base of 30 million, from the AI advertising equation. Brands shouldn’t expect sponsored links, conversations, or responses inside Claude. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is about to give brands the …

The U.S. Justice Department and a coalition of states plan to appeal a federal judge’s remedies ruling in the Google search antitrust case. The appeal challenges a decision that found Google illegally monopolized search but stopped short of imposing major structural changes, such as forcing a divestiture of Chrome or banning default search deals outright. What’s happening. The DOJ and state attorneys general filed notices of appeal yesterday, challenging U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta’s September remedies ruling, Bloomberg and Reuters reported. Mehta ruled in August 2024 that Google unlawfully maintained its search monopoly through default search agreements w…

If your CPCs keep climbing, the cause may not be your bid strategy, your budget, or even your competitors. You might be suffering from low ad quality. Let’s break down the most foundational — and most misunderstood — metric in your Google Ads account. If you want to stop overpaying Google and start winning auctions on merit, you need to understand how the 1-to-10 Quality Score actually works. The difference between Quality Score, Ad Strength, and Optimization Score Before we dive in, let’s clear up the confusion. Google shows a lot of “scores” and “diagnostics,” and you can safely ignore most of them. Quality Score is the exception. Ad strength is an …

The search landscape, today’s buyer journey, and the roadmap to digital success aren’t just shifting. They’re being structurally reimagined. To make sense of this shift, I spoke with six of the SEO industry’s most forward-thinking voices and distilled their perspectives into seven core predictions for 2026. What follows is a series of insights into how search is being structurally reimagined. 1. The rise of agentic commerce We are moving past the era of AI as an answer engine and into the era of AI as an executive assistant. “Agentic web” means AI won’t just tell you which running shoes are best. It will actually find your size, apply a coupon, and exec…

Google will now jump you directly into AI Mode when you do a follow-up question from AI Overviews within Google Search. This makes the “transition to a conversation even more seamless,” Robby Stein, VP of Product, Google Search wrote. Plus, Google AI Overviews are powered by Gemini 3 by default, globally. AI Overviews jumping to AI Mode. We covered when Google was officially testing this back in December and also before Google confirmed the test in October 2025. The ask a follow-up question within the Google Search AI Overviews will jump you into a conversation directly in AI Mode. Google said this is about “making the transition to a conversation even more se…

Microsoft has been promising to give data on the performance of websites mentioned in AI results within Bing and Copilot since February 2023 and then again in April 2023. But then decided to let us down and only lump the data together with web queries, not giving us a clear view of how our sites perform within Bing’s AI experiences. Now Bing is reportedly testing showing a new report within Bing Webmaster Tools named AI Performance report. AI Performance report. This report is currently in a super limited beta – Microsoft has not announced anything about this publicly. But a source told us this report shows citation data from both Microsoft Copilot and partners. …

Google is exploring ways to give site owners a way to prevent Google from using its content for Search AI generative features including AI Mode and AI Overviews. Google said this is based on the new requirements from UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and any measures must avoid breaking how Google Search works. What Google said. Google wrote: “We’re now exploring updates to our controls to let sites specifically opt out of Search generative AI features.” Google added that these options cannot break Google Search, Google said: “Any new controls need to avoid breaking Search in a way that leads to a fragmented or confusing experience for people.…

When Meta launched advertising nearly two decades ago, performance was driven by manual inputs – targeting rules, account structure, and incremental optimization. Success depended on carefully defined audiences, granular budget control, and frequent testing. That operating model eroded over time as privacy changes and signal loss made deterministic targeting less reliable. Over the last two years, Meta responded by fundamentally rebuilding its advertising platform around AI. That rebuild began with Andromeda, a personalized ads retrieval engine, and expanded into Meta’s Generative Ads Recommendation Model (GEM). Together, these systems now determine …

Video is one of the most complex, information-dense marketing assets. For human audiences, it delivers emotional nuance and context far more effectively than the written word. For AI models, it provides a high-density stream of data for more accurate indexing and synthesis. Once upon a time, video was confusing for search crawlers. Now, it’s “watchable” by AI. Models can deconstruct video into parallel visual, auditory, and textual streams. Let’s go through how to optimize video for AI. Why video is important for AI: contextual density optimization In the past, search engines had to read surrounding metadata to understand video. This text…

U.S. Google searchers are searching far less than a year ago, according to a new Datos/SparkToro report. The data suggests Google isn’t losing users — it’s losing repeat searches. Why we care. Google still dominates search, but it’s changing in significant ways. Fewer searches per user means fewer opportunities for clicks, ads, and traffic — even if total search volume looks steady. By the numbers. Google desktop searches per user fell nearly 20% year over year, based on clickstream data from tens of millions of U.S. users. That drop stands in sharp contrast to Europe, where searches per user declined by just 2% to 3%. Even with fewer searches per person,…

Google rolled out a small but practical update to Performance Max that makes reviewing creatives faster and less clunky. What’s new. Advertisers can now click directly on images or videos inside the Asset Groups table to instantly preview how ads will appear across different Performance Max placements — without leaving the page. Why we care. Previously, checking creative previews meant digging into separate views or settings. This change keeps advertisers in the workflow, cutting down friction during creative QA and iteration. Between the lines. Performance Max is often criticized for limited transparency, so even incremental UI improvements that surface c…

Search today looks very different from what it did even a few years ago. Users are no longer browsing through SERPs to make up their own minds; instead, they are asking AI tools for conclusions, summaries, and recommendations. This shift changes how visibility is earned, how trust is formed, and how brands are evaluated during discovery. In AI-driven search, large language models interpret information, decide what matters, and present a narrative on behalf of the user. Table of contents The rise of conversational AI as a discovery layer Not all LLMs interpret brands the same way The challenge: LLM visibility is hard to measure How does Yoast AI Brand Insights help? …

Working as an office manager in my early 20s, I read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Many of its principles still hold true today, and they guided me through multiple career transitions. Success in most careers comes from our interactions with people – whether clients or coworkers. For years, those principles of human connection, combined with technical knowledge and expertise, helped digital marketers succeed. Agencies made sense of the machines for clients, and strong relationship-building allowed them to retain those clients over time. That model is now being challenged. As AI has become fully embedded in PPC platforms, the…

We are excited to announce an update to our Offer schema within Yoast SEO for Shopify. This update introduces a more robust way to communicate pricing to search engines, specifically introducing sale price strikethroughs. What’s new? Previously, communicating a “sale” was often limited to showing a single price. With this update, we’ve refined how our schema handles the Offer object. You can now clearly define: The original price: The “base” price before any discounts. The sale price: The current active price the customer pays. Why this matters When search engines understand the relationship between your original and sale prices, they can bette…

The open web is the part of the internet built on open standards that anyone can use. This concept creates a democratic digital space where people can build on each other’s work without restrictions, just like how WordPress.org is built. For website owners, understanding and leveraging the open web is increasingly crucial. Especially with the rise of AI-powered systems and the general direction that online search is taking. So, let’s explore what the open web is and what it means for your website. What is the open web? The open web refers to the part of the internet built on open, shared standards that are available to everyone. It’s powered by technologies like HT…

Meta tests paid subscriptions across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp to unlock premium features and AI across its apps. What is happening. Meta is testing new subscriptions that unlock exclusive features across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, while keeping the core experiences free. Rather than a single bundle, Meta plans to experiment with different subscription models and feature sets tailored to each app, spanning productivity, creativity and expanded AI capabilities. Subscriptions will introduce premium controls and tools for everyday users, creators and businesses — separate from Meta Verified. On Instagram, early tests could include unlimited audience …

When ChatGPT, Claude, or Google’s AI get asked for brand or product recommendations, they almost never return the same list twice — and almost never in the same order. That’s the big finding from a new study from Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SparkToro, and Patrick O’Donnell, CTO and co-founder of Gumshoe.ai. They investigated whether generative AI recommendations are sufficiently consistent to be measured. What they tested. Six hundred volunteers ran 12 identical prompts through ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s AI nearly 3,000 times. Each response was normalized into an ordered list of brands or products. The team then compared those lists for overlap, or…