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…

The evolution of search continued to accelerate in 2025. Between GEO and AI-driven discovery, agents, and new optimization frameworks and tools, SEO experienced another huge year of change. As always, Search Engine Land helped you make sense of the advances – what was happening, what was coming next, and what truly mattered. Below are the 10 most-read SEO columns of 2025, written by our outstanding group of subject matter experts. 10. Will GEO replace SEO – or become part of it? GEO isn’t the death of SEO. It’s what happens when search becomes multi-platform, multi-modal, and powered by AI. (By Roslyn Ayers. Published Aug. 8.) 9. Meet llms.txt, a…

Google cites retailers only 4% of the time, while ChatGPT does it 36% of the time. That 9x gap means shoppers on each platform get steered in very different ways, according to new BrightEdge data. Why we care. Millions of shoppers now turn to AI for deals and gift ideas, but product discovery works differently on the two leading AI search platforms. Google leans on what people say, while ChatGPT focuses more on where you can buy it. What each AI prioritizes. Google AI Overviews cite YouTube reviews, Reddit threads, and editorial sites, while ChatGPT cite retail giants like Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Best Buy. Google AI Overviews prioritize: YouTube revi…

Google rolled out AI-powered ad carousels in the Images tab on mobile, now appearing across all categories — not just shopping-related ones. Why we care. Ads are now showing directly within image search results, giving brands a new, highly visual placement to grab attention where users are actively browsing and comparing visuals. With users often browsing images to explore ideas or compare options, these AI-powered carousels give brands a chance to influence discovery earlier in the journey. The details: The new format features horizontally scrollable carousels with images, headlines, and links. These carousels are powered by AI-driven ad matching, pul…

Google Ads’ new AI image tool, Nano Banana Pro (NB), brings conversational image generation and editing directly into campaigns, letting advertisers create seasonal, mood-adjusted, and material-specific visuals without a photoshoot. It’s part of Google’s broader push alongside Opal, its AI writing tool, to accelerate content creation across PMax, Display, and other automated campaigns. Driving the news. Ameet Khabra, founder of Hop Skip Media, ran extensive tests across three industries—mattresses, HVAC, and real estate—to evaluate NB’s performance in live campaign scenarios. She found that while the tool shows impressive results in some areas, it has notable limitati…

Google Ads’ Demand Gen campaigns – once thought of as mid-funnel discovery tools – are evolving into full-funnel, conversion-focused campaigns, with YouTube at the core. Why we care. Marketers are under pressure to prove ROI across channels. Demand Gen now blends social-style ad formats with Google’s AI-driven targeting, giving advertisers new ways to drive sales, leads, and app installs from audiences they can’t reach elsewhere. What’s new: Target CPC bidding: Advertisers can now align Demand Gen with social campaigns for apples-to-apples budget comparisons. Channel controls. Run ads only on YouTube, or expand to Display, Discover, Gmail, and even Maps. …

Food bloggers say this Thanksgiving is a breaking point. Google Search and AI Overviews, powered by Gemini 3, are rewriting recipes, stealing clicks, and in some cases serving dangerously wrong cooking instructions, Bloomberg reported. Why we care. For more than a decade, food bloggers could predict and rely on holiday traffic. Not this year. AI answers are replacing vetted recipes, cutting off creators’ main revenue streams, and confusing home cooks with stitched-together instructions that don’t always make sense. What’s happening. Google’s AI Overviews now surface blended cooking steps from multiple bloggers, often above the links/sources they draw from. Ma…

Pages that rank for Google’s AI Overview “fan-out” queries are much more likely to be cited than those that rank only for the main search query, according to data from Surfer SEO. An analysis of 10,000 keywords found a strong correlation (Spearman 0.77) between how many fan-out queries a page ranks for and its likelihood of being cited in Google’s AI Overviews. By the numbers. Pages ranking for fan-out queries are 161% more likely to be cited than pages ranking only for the main query. Also: 76% of the sampled keywords triggered AI Overviews. 33,000 fan-out queries were extracted using Gemini. Pages ranking for both the main query and at least one fan-…

Recently, there’s been discussion – and some frustration – on social media about what’s being said (and who’s saying it) about SEO, GEO, and whatever comes next. Some of that criticism has been directed at Search Engine Land, and that’s fair game. We’ve always encouraged open debate and multiple viewpoints about where search marketing is headed. But I want to take a moment to clarify what we believe, what we don’t, and why our editorial approach may not always align with everyone’s worldview – especially in this unprecedented, transitional moment for our industry. 1. SEO is not dead. Period. Search Engine Land believes SEO is very much still a thing. As Lil…

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…

Marketers have debated SEO versus PPC for years, usually shaped by whatever has worked – or failed – for them in the past. Organic search promises compounding visibility, while paid search delivers immediate control. Most teams ultimately favor one over the other based on experience, budget constraints, or a survival instinct. But in 2026, this old debate no longer fits the reality of search. Why this debate has changed The search landscape has shifted, and the old SEO-or-PPC debate no longer fits. Search behavior has evolved. Search results pages have evolved. The platforms – and the machine learning driving their bidding systems – have e…

The MCP Server for Google Ads is now publicly available on GitHub, Google announced. This marks a major milestone in bringing AI agents closer to real-world marketing workflows. How it works. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that allows large language models to interact with external applications through natural language. The initial version of the MCP Server is read-only, designed for diagnostics and analytics. Developers can integrate it into any MCP-compatible AI system to retrieve insights from Google Ads accounts securely. Why we care. The release of the open-source Google Ads API Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server makes it easier…

Marketers face AI news every day, and it’s almost impossible to keep up. AI agents are on the rise, but many are still in early development, beta testing, or lack real market adoption. So let’s skip ahead five years and look at what the future could hold. Picture this: You wake up in 2030 and check your phone. While you were sleeping, your AI agent optimized 50 campaigns, negotiated media buys with other agents, and earned $3,000 helping solve problems around the world. This isn’t science fiction – it’s where performance marketing is headed, and it may become reality soon. From scripts to personal AI assistants Today’s PPC automation still f…

Adding fake publication dates to online content can dramatically boost its visibility across leading AI models, a team from Waseda University discovered. This seems to confirm that tools like ChatGPT systematically favor newer content over older, equally relevant material. Why we care. AI models seem to reward timestamps more than quality. That means your older high-quality content could vanish from AI search results unless it’s regularly updated – apparently, regardless of whether those updates are substantial or artificial. How they did it. Researchers added fake publication dates to passages from standardized test collections with no other changes. Then they as…

Google is rolling out new more visibile links within AI Overviews and AI Mode. These new link cards appear in a pop-up window when you hover over them on desktop. They also show more prominent details about the website. Google was testing these earlier and now this new style is live. What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of these new link pop up menus on hover: What Google said. Google’s Robby Stein posted on X saying: “New on Search: In AI Overviews and AI Mode, groups of links will automatically appear in a pop-up as you hover over them on desktop, so you can jump right into a website to learn more. And we’ll show more descriptive and prominent…

One of the most energetic conversations around AI has been what I’ll call “AI hype meets AI reality.” Tools such as Semush One and its Enterprise AIO tool came onto the market and offered something we could not live without: The data on what was happening inside LLMs. How many citations were we capturing? How many mentions were our brands gobbling up? This data became, and still is, an incredible novelty. But with the data came questions like “What’s the ROI here?” and “How do I interpret this data and integrate it into my team’s actual marketing strategy?” It’s clear the data provided by these tools is very valuable and very intriguing, but what do you do with …

Google sends publishers 831x more visitors than AI systems, according to TollBit’s State of the Bots Q2 2025 report. Even though AI referrals barely register next to Google’s, bots are hammering publisher sites — pushing costs higher, scraping more content, and often ignoring rules meant to limit them. Scraping up, referrals down. AI is scraping the web, but it still isn’t sending meaningful visitors back. Google referrals dropped from 90%+ of all external traffic in Q2 2024 to 84.1% in Q2 2025. AI apps sent just 0.102% of referrals. For every visitor from an AI system, Google delivered 831. Click-through rates from AI interfaces were weak – 91% lower th…

With AI Max for Search now widely available in beta, advertisers are debating everything from performance comparisons to how it plays with existing keyword structures. Google Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin is stepping in to clarify what AI Max is — and what it isn’t. What AI Max is designed to do. AI Max aims to unlock incremental conversions or conversion value — not replace or compete with your current keyword setup. It expands reach using broad match logic and keywordless matching (think DSA-style crawling of your landing pages). It pairs that with dynamic creative optimization, including text customization and Final URL expansion, to match intent more precisely…

AI hasn’t replaced traditional search – it’s expanding it, according to Robby Stein, Google’s VP of Product for Search, speaking in a new interview on Lenny’s Podcast. Google is seeing more searches than ever as people ask harder, more conversational, and more visual questions powered by AI, Stein said: “People come to search for just ridiculously wide set of things. … They want specific phone number. They want a price for something. They want to get directions. They want to find a payment web page for their taxes. Like every possible thing you can imagine. “I think the vastness of that is underappreciated by many people. And what we see is that … AI hasn’t r…

Microsoft Copilot is transforming search advertising by turning everyday conversations into intent-rich signals advertisers can act on. ROAS increases 13-fold when users engage with Copilot before performing a search, according to Microsoft. Drawing from billions of first-party audience insights across Microsoft’s consumer ecosystem – including Bing, Edge, Xbox, LinkedIn, and Activision – Copilot identifies high-value audiences using deterministic data built from search intent, web activity, and profile information. This allows advertisers to reduce wasted impressions and stretch budgets further. The mechanics of intent-rich search The core propositi…

The AI resume has become a C-suite-level asset that reflects your entire digital strategy. To use it effectively, we first need to understand where AI is deploying it across the user journey. How AI has rewritten the user journey For years, our strategies were shaped by the inbound methodology. We built content around a user-driven path through awareness, consideration, and decision, with traditional SEO acting as the engine behind those moments. That journey has now been fundamentally reshaped. AI assistive engines – conversational systems like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity – are collapsing the funnel. They move users from discovery to dec…

On episode 334 of PPC Live The Podcast, I speak to Sophie Fell Head of Paid Media at Liberty Marketing Group about a real PPC mistake involving location targeting. The conversation focuses on how small oversights can have big consequences—and how to recover from them professionally. The PPC F-Up: worldwide location targeting Sophie accidentally launched a campaign with worldwide location targeting enabled instead of restricting it to the client’s service area. In just a couple of days, the campaign generated around 1,500 leads that looked impressive on paper but were unusable because they came from outside the target locations. When great results are a warning …

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…

People are already turning to AI to answer questions, compare products, and make decisions in seconds. That shift exposes a fundamental problem: the web’s underlying structure was never built for machines. As AI agents mature, the way information is delivered – and the need for traditional webpages – could change dramatically. Disruption is normal – even when we don’t see it coming The idea that the web as we know it could end, which I mentioned during a live OXD podcast in Salzburg, drew reactions ranging from thoughtful to angry. Someone even insisted, “The web will always be there.” But anyone paying attention knows that “always” and “never” r…

Microsoft Bing now supports the data-nosnippet HTML attribute. This gives brands and businesses more control over what content appears in search results and AI-generated answers, including in Copilot. Why we care. This gives you more control over how your content appears in Bing’s search results and AI answers. You can protect paywalled or experimental sections and shape how your brand is represented in AI summaries. How it works. The attribute lets webmasters mark sections of a page to exclude from snippets or AI summaries, without affecting indexing or ranking. Bing still crawls and ranks the page, but omits the marked content from previews. Use cases. You c…