SEO Tools and Resources

AI Max is Google’s latest foray into semi-keywordless targeting. While you need keywords for the system to have a starting place, Google uses signals beyond keywords in deciding how to show ads to searchers. In accounts with a strong history of broad match success, AI Max can be highly effective at finding new conversions. If accounts are not well-optimized or have not been successful with broad match, AI Max can be a huge money pit. To clear up a rumor before we get into the data: you do not have to use AI Max to have ads appear in AI Overviews. Broad match keywords can show ads in AI Overviews regardless of your AI Max usage. We’re looking at…

Yahoo has launched its first version of its AI-based answer engine named Yahoo! Scout. Yahoo! Scout is available at scout.yahoo.com and is also embedded through Yahoo’s massive network of sites; Yahoo News, Finance, Mail and of course, Yahoo Search. Think of it as a Yahoo-branded AI companion for Yahoo users, that is there to help you along the way within those specific properties. What is Yahoo Scout. Yahoo Scout is Yahoo’s take at an AI search engine and companion, much like Google’s AI Mode or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but with a flare from Yahoo. Yahoo told me that they wanted Yahoo Scout to have personality, to make it fun and engaging for users to interact with and allo…

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…

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…

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…

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 …

Most brands performing well in traditional local search fail to appear in results from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, according to SOCi’s newly released 2026 local visibility index. Also of note: business profile information was only about 68% accurate on ChatGPT and Perplexity, compared with 100% accuracy on Gemini, which is grounded in Google Maps. AI limits local visibility. Performance data from nearly 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands was analyzed to measure how often locations are surfaced or recommended by AI assistants. Turns out, AI platforms are far more selective than Google’s local results: 1.2% of locations were recommended…

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? …

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…

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…

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…

I’ve spent over 20 years in companies where SEO sat in different corners of the organization – sometimes as a full-time role, other times as a consultant called in to “find what’s wrong.” Across those roles, the same pattern kept showing up. The technical fix was rarely what unlocked performance. It revealed symptoms, but it almost never explained why progress stalled. No governance The real constraints showed up earlier, long before anyone read my weekly SEO reports. They lived in reporting lines, decision rights, hiring choices, and in what teams were allowed to change without asking permission. When SEO struggled, it was usually because nobody rightfull…

Digital PR is about to matter more than ever. Not because it’s fashionable, or because agencies have rebranded link building with a shinier label, but because the mechanics of search and discovery are changing. Brand mentions, earned media, and the wider PR ecosystem are now shaping how both search engines and large language models understand brands. That shift has serious implications for how SEO professionals should think about visibility, authority, and revenue. At the same time, informational search traffic is shrinking. Fewer people are clicking through long blog posts written to target top-of-funnel keywords. The commercial value in search is consolida…

Google spoke about its year-end report on the crawling challenges Google faced in 2025 when crawling and indexing the web for Google Search. The biggest challenges include faceted navigation and action parameters, which make up about 75% of those challenges, Gary Illyes from Google said. This was on its latest Search Off the Record podcast, published this morning. What is the issue. Crawling issues can cause your site to lag and slow, it can overload your server, and make your website unusable and inaccessible. If a robot goes off on your site and gets into some infinite loop of crawling, it can take some time for the site to recover. “Once it discovers a set of …

Microsoft has rolled out multi-turn search globally within Bing search results. Microsoft will add a Copilot search box to the bottom of the Bing search results, as you scroll down the search results page, this feature will dynamically appear. What is multi-turn search. This is when a searcher goes from the Bing search results, types in a follow up query into the Copilot search box at the bottom of the search results. Here is a screenshot of this feature: Here is a video of it in action: What Microsoft said. Jordi Ribas, CVP, Head of Search at Microsoft, posted this news on X – he said, “After shipping in the US last year, multi-turn search in Bing i…

Search marketing is still as powerful as ever. Google recently surpassed $100 billion in ad revenue in a single quarter, with more than half coming from search. But search alone can no longer deliver the same results most businesses expect. As Google Ads Coach Jyll Saskin Gales showed at SMX Next, real performance now comes from going beyond traditional search and using it to strengthen a broader PPC strategy. The challenge with traditional Search Marketing As search marketers, we’re great at reaching people who are actively searching for what we sell. But we often miss people who fit our ideal audience and aren’t searching yet. The real opportunity sits at…

People inspecting ChatGPT responses are spotting references to ads in the page source. One line reads: “InReply to user query using the following additional context of ads shown to the user.” The reference appears even when no ad is actually displayed. Driving the news. Digital Marketer Glenn Gabe first flagged the issue on X after noticing the ad-related language in ChatGPT’s source code. Others have since replicated it while testing commercial queries like auto insurance. Why we care. Ads in ChatGPT have been talked about for weeks. This piece of code spotted signals that ChatGPT ads are moving from concept to near-launch, creating a new, high-intent adverti…

Innovations are coming at marketers and consumers faster than before, raising the question: Are we actually ready for the agentic web? To answer that question, it’s important to unpack a few supporting ones: What’s the agentic web? How can the agentic web be used? What are the pros and cons of the agentic web? It’s important to note that this article isn’t a mandate for AI skeptics to abandon the rational questions they have about the agentic web. Nor is it intended to place any judgment on how you, as a consumer or professional, engage with the agentic web. With thoughts and feelings so divided on the agentic web, this article aims to provi…

As part of the v23 Ads API launch, Performance Max campaigns can now be reported by channel, including Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, Maps, and Search Partners. Previously, performance data was largely grouped into a single mixed category. The change under the hood. Earlier API versions typically returned a MIXED value for the ad_network_type segment in Performance Max campaigns. With v23, those responses now break out into specific channel enums — a meaningful shift for reporting and optimization. Why we care. Google Ads API v23 doesn’t just add features — it changes how advertisers understand Performance Max. The update introduces channel-level repor…