SEO Tools and Resources

ChatGPT announced the addition of shopping features to search last week. But how exactly is ChatGPT search choosing products and ranking them? Here’s what you need to know from OpenAI’s documentation. How product results are selected. When ChatGPT detects shopping intent in a query, it selects products based on a mix of the following: User intent and context Based on the user’s current query (e.g., “funny dog costumes”). May include saved memory (e.g., past dislikes, such as “clowns”). May factor in custom instructions (e.g., preferences like “I want affordable options”). Structured third-party data. Product metadata such as: Price. Product des…

Generative search engines like ChatGPT have successfully used SEO as part of their growth strategy, even as the echo chambers of the web claim they’re killing this powerful marketing channel. Let’s take a look at how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude fare in SEO, and why ChatGPT’s investment in the strategy is paying off. Directional SEO ROI forecast A $600,000 annual SEO investment could generate outsized returns for generative AI platforms. Using Semrush-reported monthly organic traffic — 76.5 million visits for ChatGPT, 908,000 for Claude, and 1.7 million for Perplexity — plus a conservative 0.5% conversion rate and a $20/month entry price, projected return…

In February 2025, the world watched as a small group of humanoid robots took the stage at the CCTV Chinese New Year show for the very first time. It was a charming performance, even if the steps were shaky and the movements were mostly limited to the arms. Just one year later, at the Spring Festival Gala, the shaky steps were gone and the humanoid robots were able to actually run and do standing somersaults and full kung fu routines with swords and nunchaku. The message was clear: in just one year, we have witnessed a decade’s worth of advancement. The 10-year leap in technology is real and not limited to robotics. Which raises a critical question for every digita…

Capturing intent at the precise moment consumers are ready to take action has always been the goal in search. But there’s value – and real payoff – in influencing that intent before the search even begins. As customer journeys grow more complex and span multiple touchpoints, the need to reach audiences earlier continues to rise. Connected TV (CTV) advertising offers that opportunity. It helps build brand awareness and consideration that drive downstream search behavior – all while maintaining the targeting precision and measurement capabilities search professionals expect. What is connected TV? Connected TV encompasses any television that offers …

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…

We spent six months testing custom visual assets across 47 articles on a client’s high-traffic accounting education website to find out which design investments actually improved SEO performance. The experiment included featured images, infographics, and video across both new and existing content. Some visual assets consistently increased organic traffic. Others turned out to be a poor use of time and budget despite requiring far more production effort. The goal wasn’t to prove that any image helps. Basic visuals are already table stakes. Instead, the focus was on the ROI of bespoke design and which visual assets consistently improved organic traffic. The clea…

Andriana18, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons W. Edwards Deming’s 14 principles transformed manufacturing by emphasizing quality, efficiency and continuous improvement. His ideas weren’t just about improving production lines—they were about creating a culture of adaptability and excellence. Today, marketing faces its own shift. The traditional, assembly-line model of campaign execution—where data, creative, and deployment are handled in rigid steps—is no longer fast enough for real-time customer engagement. Positionless Marketing builds on Deming’s legacy by enabling marketers to act independently, collaborate fluidly and use AI-powered tools to engage custome…

Generative AI is no longer a single thing. Ask, “What is the best generative AI tool for writing PR content?” or “Is keyword targeting as impossible as spinning straw into gold?,” and each engine will take a different route from prompt to answer. For writers, editors, PR pros, and content strategists, those routes matter – every AI system has its own strengths, transparency, and expectations for how to check, edit, and cite what it produces. This article covers the top AI platforms – ChatGPT (OpenAI), Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek, and Claude (Anthropic) – and explains how they: Find and synthesize information. Source and train on data. Use…

AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews are reshaping how people discover information. Digital marketing agencies feel the impact firsthand and must adapt quickly. They need to keep their services relevant, their processes outcome-driven, and their results easy to prove. This article explores how 10 agencies have updated their strategies, services, and client relationships to win in the AI search era. What AI search changes for digital marketing agencies Semrush predicted that AI search will surpass organic traffic in 2028. It’s easy to see why. A growing number of people now start their searches with AI inste…

While Google still dominates local search, ChatGPT has made notable strides. Its local results, though not yet on par with Google’s, have improved significantly since we ranked it last among AI search tools less than a year ago. The key change? ChatGPT’s integration with Microsoft Bing’s search index last fall. While it now pulls web content from Bing, it applies its own algorithm to organize results. As a result, the best way to make your business visible in ChatGPT is to ensure it’s included in Bing’s index. However, ChatGPT processes local queries differently than Bing does. Here are several key differences I uncovered by running side-by…

Is your landing page converting better—or worse—than your competitors’? If you’re not sure, now’s the time to find out. Unbounce’s new Conversion Benchmark Report provides a clear, data-backed look at how landing pages are performing across industries. The report includes median conversion rates by sector, giving marketers a useful baseline to assess their own performance. The report also offers helpful guidance for interpreting your own results—whether you’re outperforming the median or identifying areas for optimization. It reminds marketers that conversion rate is just one piece of the puzzle: lower conversion rates might still represent high-value leads, and e…

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’…

Search is dead, long live search! Search isn’t what it used to be. Search engines no longer simply match keywords or phrases in user queries with webpages. We are moving well beyond the world of lexical search, which is simply text-based with no understanding of the semantic connections between not only things but multimedia representations of things/concepts. Today, AI can understand, contextualize, and generate information in response to user intent largely utilizing probabilistic prediction and pattern matching. This transformation is being driven by generative information retrieval. Generative information retrieval is a fundamental shift in how sy…

How does adding coordinates to the EXIF data affect local rank? Our team wanted to find out. That’s why we recently conducted a 10-week study on the effects of geotagging for local rank. The geotagged images seemed to only affect the ranking for “near me” queries in the areas the EXIF data coordinates specified. Their impact on those queries in those areas was positive and statistically significant. However, the study also found that queries that mentioned specific towns saw a decrease in ranking during the same period. In other words, when EXIF data targeted Salt Lake City, Utah, the query [lawn care near me] saw a significant increase in rank. For the sa…

Budgeting in paid search isn’t just about setting a daily number. It requires understanding how platforms pace spend, the exceptions to those rules, and what changes when budgets are adjusted mid-month. Most PPC advertisers change budgets during the month and want to know how it will affect performance. Enterprise advertisers add complexity, with fiscal cycles and promotional flights that rarely align with calendar months. The problem is that many advertisers assume platforms will simply spread spend evenly. When that doesn’t happen, campaigns overspend one week and underspend the next. Both outcomes are costly. Overspending erodes profita…

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 …

Google introduced publisher follows and profile pages to Discover last year but the feature remains lightly documented and poorly understood. Since then, publisher profiles have started appearing more broadly across Discover for publishers, creators, and social-first accounts. Here’s how Discover publisher profiles appear to function today, how they connect to social accounts and the Knowledge Graph, and why some publishers are already getting access to more customizable profile experiences. Why publisher profiles matter more now As a technical SEO, I’m used to Google leaving plenty unsaid in its documentation. Discover publisher profiles take that even fur…

Google Discover runs on a structured, multi-stage pipeline with hard publisher blocks, strict image requirements, freshness decay, and heavy experimentation shaping what users see, according to new SDK-level research by Metehan Yesilyurt. Why we care. Google Discover can drive massive traffic, but it often feels unpredictable. This research gives you a clearer view of how your content qualifies, gets ranked, or gets blocked — and where things can break before ranking even begins. The details. Yesilyurt analyzed observable signals in Google’s Discover app framework and mapped a nine-stage flow. Google: Crawls and understands your content. Reads key meta tag…

Google’s AI Overviews continue to disrupt search as we know it. For advertisers, the landscape is shifting fast, with AI-generated answers now appearing on more queries and across more industries. Early Adthena data shows Paid Search click-through rates could decline by 8–12 percentage points (roughly a 20–40% relative drop) as AI-generated answers take up more space on the SERP. To understand the real impact of Google’s AI Overviews, Adthena’s data science team analyzed over 21 million indexes across two four-week periods (April – May and August – September) spanning five key industries: Retail, Travel, Finance, Healthcare, and Automotive. Our goal was to uncover…

When a client calls about a damaging search result, you might typically default to one of two responses: “we can suppress it” or “there’s nothing we can do.” Both skip the middle ground — where Google’s removal tools live. Google provides tools to remove or deindex content from search results. They’re underused, frequently misunderstood, and often conflated. This guide breaks down what each tool does, when to use it, and what it can’t do — so you can triage client situations accurately and set expectations that hold. The distinction that changes everything: removal vs. deindexing Before you use any tool, get one thing right with clients: the difference betw…

For years, ecommerce ran on a simple model: Google drove traffic, and your site did the selling. Rankings, clicks, and conversion rate determined performance. That model just changed. With the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and AI Mode, Google can now discover, compare, and complete purchases inside its own AI experiences. Search is shifting from a traffic channel to a transaction layer. Visibility now depends on whether Google’s AI selects your product data. When AI makes the recommendation and closes the sale, optimization moves upstream. The question isn’t just whether you rank. It’s whether you’re chosen. Here’s what changed and what SEO and AI optimiza…

As Google rolls out AI Overviews, AI Mode in Search, and the Gemini ecosystem, we face a growing challenge: what happens when users get answers — and soon complete purchases — without leaving Google’s interfaces? Enter Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), now in beta. UCP is designed to help brands to sell to consumers without leaving the Gemini or LLM experience. Consumers can check out within the LLM, add rewards points, and fully execute the transaction. Here’s an example flow: How Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol works At its core, UCP standardizes how consumer AI interfaces communicate with merchant checkout systems. When a user tells G…

In November 2025, Google solved a persistent SEO reporting challenge: separating branded from non-branded search performance directly in Google Search Console (GSC). The feature is now fully rolled out to eligible properties. For years, we’ve relied on regular expression (regex) filters, custom dashboards like Looker Studio, or third-party tools — approaches that were often inconsistent and difficult to maintain. Now, GSC’s branded query filter brings that capability natively into one of the most widely used organic reporting platforms. With this shift, a key gap in SEO reporting becomes easier to address — along with some of the assumptions behind it. Brand deman…

Search performance is shifting across industries as AI systems increasingly answer first and link later, changing how brands earn visibility and attribution. You now have to think beyond rankings and focus on how your brand is interpreted and cited inside AI-generated results. Answer engine optimization (AEO) has moved from emerging concept to required practice. Structure, clarity, and credibility now function as core visibility signals that help large language models interpret, summarize, and confidently present content. The implications are universal, but not uniform. In retail, AEO reshapes product discovery. In healthcare, it tests accuracy …

A majority of marketing leaders are diversifying and adjusting their strategies due to AI search, the fragmentation of search, and a potential Google breakup, according to a new survey from enterprise SEO platform Botify. Why we care. SEO continuing to change. Quickly. ChatGPT and other generative/answer engines have the potential to reshape the search paradigm. Meanwhile, more people believe Google’s search quality is in declining (in part due to AI Overviews taking over the most valuable space in search results and brutal algorithm updates). And many sites are seeing the erosion of organic traffic from Google. The big picture. 62% of marketing leaders said they …