SEO Tools and Resources

Google once attributed two of Barry Schwartz’s Search Engine Land articles to me — a misclassification at the annotation layer that briefly rewrote authorship in Google’s systems. For a few days, when you searched for certain Search Engine Land articles Schwartz had written, Google listed me as the author. The articles appeared in my entity’s publication list and were connected to my Knowledge Panel. What happened illustrates something the SEO industry has almost entirely overlooked: that annotation — not the content itself — is the key to what users see and thus your success. How Google annotated the page and got the author wrong Googlebot crawled those pa…

Many of today’s PPC tools were designed to be easily accessible to ecommerce. That doesn’t mean lead gen can’t take advantage of them, but it does mean more intentional application is required. Lead gen with AI still requires a creative approach, and many conventional ecommerce tools still apply — but not always in the same way. Here are the priorities that matter most for succeeding with lead gen using AI. Disclosure: I’m a Microsoft employee. While this guidance is platform-agnostic, I’ll reference examples that lean into Microsoft Advertising tooling. The principles apply broadly across platforms. 1. Fix your conversion data first This is the single …

For most people, “Mad Men” means the TV show. But the phrase points to something more specific: Madison Avenue in the 1950s and ‘60s, when agencies grew brands through persuasion, positioning, and earned trust in a world of scarce media channels and powerful gatekeepers. If you wanted attention, you bought your way in, then made your product the obvious choice. When the internet arrived and Google made the chaos navigable, an entire industry was built on getting brands found. Search and SEO became one of the most commercially valuable disciplines in marketing. That model isn’t disappearing. But something new is taking shape on top of it — and most of the industry …

I’m getting a mid-career executive MBA. Last week, in class, we discussed the interaction between automation and advertising. The lecture covered why A/B testing in Meta is less valuable now, since Facebook can auto-optimize faster and better than marketers can on their own. A classmate took the logical leap and asked the professor, “If digital channels have more data and more processing power, why don’t advertisers just give them a URL and a credit card and let them go wild?” The argument has real merit. Google, Meta, and LinkedIn have access to more data than any agency ever will. Their optimization engines are improving fast. Handing them a budget and a URL an…

For years, Salesforce Marketing Cloud was the safe choice. Powerful. Enterprise. Trusted. But lately, we’re hearing something different: “Our data is too tangled to activate.” “We’re locked into contracts.” “We’re stuck sending the same emails on repeat.” “Everything is Band-Aids and duct tape — I don’t know how we can move without breaking everything.” “We feel stuck.” Sound familiar? If so, this fireside chat is for you. We’ve helped dozens of brands migrate off Salesforce and into modern, composable engagement architectures built for real CRM performance. Not because it’s trendy — but because marketers needed more speed, flexibility, an…

Eligible Yoast customers can now run a free Yoast AI Brand Insights scan and get a personalized report showing how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini see your brand. Your brand is part of the AI conversation whether you’re monitoring it or not. Yoast AI Brand Insights, part of the Yoast SEO AI+ plan gives you visibility into what AI tools say about you, how often you appear, and whether the picture they paint matches reality. To help you see that for yourself, we’re offering eligible customers a free, one-time scan. What you’ll see Your AI Visibility Index: a clear score showing how present your brand is across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini Sentiment analysis:…

If you rank your own product #1 in “best of” listicles, it’s not just a search-quality issue — it may violate FTC rules that took effect in October 2024. Driving the news. As Lily Ray noted on LinkedIn, the FTC’s Consumer Review Rule (16 CFR Part 465) prohibits several deceptive practices tied to reviews and testimonials, including: Presenting company-controlled content as independent reviews. Publishing reviews of products or services never actually used. Attributing reviews to people who didn’t write them. Penalties can reach up to $53,088 per violation, and each page may count separately. Ray also shared a reference table she generated with the help …

Human-written content dominates Google’s top rankings, appearing in the No. 1 position 80% of the time versus just 9% for purely AI-generated pages, based on a Semrush analysis of 42,000 blog posts. The details. Semrush analyzed 20,000 keywords and their top 10 results, classifying content with an AI detector. Human-written pages outperformed AI and mixed content across all top 10 positions. The gap was widest at Position 1, where human content was 8x more likely to rank. AI content appeared more often lower on Page 1, nearly doubling from Positions 1 to 4. Yes, but. AI detection tools are widely known to be inconsistent and can misclassify human and AI…

In this case study, we went deep instead of broad. We focused on one question: why wasn’t a brand present in a single ChatGPT prompt across ~70 iterations? We chose one prompt: “What are the best hotels in New York City?” We analyzed mentions, citations, fanouts, and SERPs in Google and Bing. We also planned to analyze GPT memory, but it made no discernible difference to mentions, citations, or fanouts. What we did and what we found We chose NYC hotels because it’s a crowded, mature market with juggernauts and up-and-comers. We also have no connection to the NYC luxury hotel space — we intentionally picked an area where we could stay objective and learn fr…

Is it possible to get an accurate view of the current state of SEO? There have been multiple attempts to reach consensus on what works, predict what might be coming, and identify the factors that may play a role in “good” (or “bad”) SEO. As useful and productive as some of this may be, none of it offers the same grounded data as the Web Almanac, a project I was honored to be a part of. With the publication of the 2025 SEO chapter, we can now review the data and spot the emerging trends from 2025 and what that could mean for SEO in 2026. SEO standards on the rise 2025 has been another year of increasingly higher SEO standards — which can only be a good thin…

Most guidance on optimizing for AI still focuses on how content is written. But AI systems don’t read content the way humans do. These systems extract information, break it into parts, and reuse it in new contexts. What matters is whether your content can be pulled into an AI-sourced answer cleanly. Where traditional SEO has centered on ranking pages, AI systems prioritize retrievable units of meaning. That changes how content needs to be built: From pages → passages From narratives → modular blocks From keywords → structured intent The shift is structural: Content that performs well in this environment is designed to be extracted, recombined, and attr…

For a long time, links were the primary signal of authority in search. If you wanted visibility, you built backlinks. If you wanted credibility, you earned placements. That still matters — but it’s no longer enough. In AI-driven search, authority is shaped by how often your brand is mentioned, cited, and clearly associated with a topic. Visibility comes from being referenced in AI-generated answers. With that shift in mind, the goal is to create content that earns consistent brand mentions and citations — the signals that now drive AEO visibility. The philosophy driving content that fuels AEO growth In 2026 organic discovery, authority incorporates entity r…

Since 2021, I’ve worked on more than 350 published guest posts. In that time, I’ve refined a repeatable guest posting outreach process that consistently drives approvals without ever paying for a placement. Although guest blogging is becoming more difficult, the basics of personalized guest posting outreach remain the same. If your mindset is to create mutual value, this process will work for you in 2026 and beyond. Step 1: Build your outreach list Your outreach list is a collection of the websites you’ll email to offer guest-written content. You can build your list in several ways. The easiest way to find potential websites is by googling your niche alongs…

AI search is changing how visibility works. Users are getting direct answers instead of clicking links, which means fewer chances to drive traffic. In this shift, AI citations are becoming the new gatekeepers, deciding which sources get featured in answers. Over the past year, search has moved from ranking pages to selecting sources, pushing us from traditional SEO toward AI-driven visibility. In this article, we’ll explain what AI citations are, how they work, and how you can earn them. Table of contents What are AI citations? How AI citations impact brand credibility How AI citations work: a complete breakdown Strategies to get cited by AI models Tracking AI b…

We’ve all seen the charts going viral on LinkedIn. They’re everywhere at this point. Multiple industry studies, even this research from Semrush, confirm that Wikipedia and Reddit are the top-cited domains across major LLM platforms — and CMOs are running with this data. The response is predictable: Just search for any bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) software query, and you’ll find Reddit threads in the top-ranking positions. This is exactly why the market is currently flooded with “Reddit SEO” agencies: Just stop. Taking this macro context — or a few isolated, high-ranking SERPs — and pivoting your entire GEO strategy toward Reddit or Wikipedia is a massive s…

Google is testing AI-generated summaries in YouTube feeds, replacing video titles with auto-written synopses. Some YouTube users are seeing video titles replaced by AI-generated summaries in the Android app. Reports on Reddit showed title-less video cards with collapsible summary boxes instead. The details. Video thumbnails remain, but titles are missing in some cases. AI summaries appear in expandable text boxes beneath each video. Users must tap to expand summaries to understand the content. The test appears limited to YouTube on Android. Why we care. This further abstracts creator metadata and reduces control over how your YouTube content appears…

Advertisers can now generate short videos directly inside Google Ads using Veo, Google’s most advanced generative video model — no video production required. How it works. Upload up to three static images into Asset Studio and Veo generates videos up to 10 seconds long with natural motion, designed specifically for YouTube formats and audiences. These can then be turned into ready-to-serve ads using customisable templates. What else it can do. Combined with Nano Banana, advertisers can adapt creatives further — swapping backgrounds, adjusting messaging, and tailoring content to specific audience interests. The bigger picture. This follows Google’s earlier …

Heidi Sturrock, a paid search consultant with 24 years of industry experience, joined me on a recent episode of PPC Live The Podcast. The episode covers a broad match mistake with an unexpected silver lining, and Heidi’s experience testing AI Max across 50+ accounts. The broad match mistake — and the unexpected silver lining Early in her career, Heidi ran a competitor conquest campaign for a high-spending B2B SaaS client using broad match — without adding negative keywords — and launched it on a Friday with a large daily budget. Over the weekend, the client’s call centre was flooded with angry calls from the competitor’s customers looking for refunds and tech suppo…

AI search often fails to identify which Spanish-speaking market it’s serving. Instead, it blends regional terminology, legal frameworks, and commercial context into a single response, creating answers that don’t map to any real market. The result is answers that mix multiple countries into something no user can actually use. This is the “Global Spanish” problem. How AI turns ‘correct’ Spanish into useless answers Ask a chatbot in Spanish how to file your taxes — cómo puedo declarar impuestos — and watch what happens. The response is grammatically perfect, well structured, and seemingly helpful. Then, in a single bullet point, it casually lists “RFC, NIF, SS…

There’s no such thing as “too much information” in AI search. The more detail you provide, the less likely your business is to be replaced by third-party sources — or left out entirely. With the rise of AI search, we know users want answers, and they want them fast. Google Maps has Know before you go and Ask Maps about this place (not to be confused with Ask Maps, the new conversational “AI Mode” in Google Maps), both AI features that let users easily find information about a place without visiting their website or social media. Merchant Center added a new feature, Business Agent, that allows shoppers to chat with brands. Business Agent pulls from the business’s p…

The OpenAI GPT Store launched in January 2024 with more than 3 million custom GPTs. Ask any team how many they still use, and the answer is usually zero or one. Most business GPTs fail because they’re built like novelties rather than tools. They’re too broad, under-tested, and launched without a strategy, so they never become part of a team’s workflow. I’ve built and audited 12+ custom GPTs across marketing, SEO, and sales teams. The pattern is consistent: a small number get used daily, while most collect dust. Here’s how to build GPTs that do — from validating the right use case to structuring, testing, and launching in a way that drives real adoption. …

Microsoft Advertising now allows e-commerce merchants to edit their Merchant Center store name and domain directly within the platform — no support ticket required. Why we care. Store details like names and URLs change as businesses rebrand or restructure. Previously, updating these required manual intervention. Self-serve control reduces friction and keeps campaigns running more smoothly during transitions. How it works — the details: Store name changes go through editorial review before going live. During review, ads keep running under the existing approved name — so there’s no interruption to campaigns. Domain/URL changes require merchants to verify…

Reddit today opened its Pro publishing tools to all publishers, removing the waitlist and offering free access in a public beta to expand distribution and engagement. Why we care. Reddit Pro gives you a centralized tool to track where your content spreads, streamline posting, and find the right communities. It transforms Reddit from a manual posting exercise into a structured distribution channel. The details. You can now sign up for Reddit Pro, verify your domain (typically within three business days), and access the Links tab. With Reddit Pro, you can: Track where your content is shared across Reddit. Auto-import articles via RSS for quick posting. Ge…

A bug in Google Ads Editor is causing structured snippet extensions copied between accounts to remain unintentionally linked. When advertisers change the language in one account, it can automatically update the same extension in another. Why we care. This bug creates hidden inconsistencies for advertisers managing multi-market campaigns, especially when different languages are required across accounts. What advertisers are seeing. The issue surfaced while managing Czech and Slovak e-commerce accounts by digital marketer Marcin Wsół. Changing the snippet language in one account triggered the same change in the other. The extensions appear separate but behave a…

Google removed a Search Engine Land article (Report: Clickout Media turned news sites into AI gambling hubs, published March 26) from its search results after a copyright complaint (that appears, to us, to be entirely false). Meanwhile, a similar DMCA filing led to the takedown of the original Press Gazette investigation. What happened. A DMCA notice filed March 27 claimed Search Engine Land copied content “word for word” and used proprietary images. The complaint led Google to begin removing the article from search results globally. The notice identifies the complainant as “US Webspam,” with no clear public attribution. The context. The removed article re…