SEO Tools and Resources

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’s AI Mode isn’t more likely to cite content that appears “above the fold,” according to a study from SALT.agency, a technical SEO and content agency. After analyzing more than 2,000 URLs cited in AI Mode responses, researchers found no correlation between how high text appears on a page and whether Google’s AI selects it for citation. Pixel depth doesn’t matter. AI Mode cited text from across entire pages, including content buried thousands of pixels down. Citation depth showed no meaningful relationship to visibility. Average depth varied by vertical, from about 2,400 pixels in travel to 4,600 pixels in SaaS, with many citations far below the tr…

We know AI responses are probabilistic – if you ask an AI the same question 10 times, you’ll get 10 different responses. But how different are the responses? That’s the question Rand Fishkin explored in some interesting research. And it has big implications for how we should think about tracking AI visibility for brands. In his research, he tested prompts asking for recommendations in all sorts of products and services, including everything from chef’s knives to cancer care hospitals and Volvo dealerships in Los Angeles. Basically, he found that: AIs rarely recommend the same list of brands in the same order twice. For a given topic (e.g., runn…

Most SEO professionals give Google too much credit. We assume Google understands content the way we do — that it reads our pages, grasps nuance, evaluates expertise, and rewards quality in some deeply intelligent way. The DOJ antitrust trial told a different story. Under oath, Google VP of Search Pandu Nayak described a first-stage retrieval system built on inverted indexes and postings lists, traditional information retrieval methods that predate modern AI by decades. Court exhibits from the remedies phase reference “Okapi BM25,” the canonical lexical retrieval algorithm that Google’s system evolved from. The first gate your content has to pass through isn’t a neural…

Anthropic updated its crawler documentation this week, clarifying how its Claude bots access websites and how you can block them. Anthropic’s document explains what each bot does, how it affects AI training and search visibility, and how to opt out through robots.txt. Why we care. If you publish or own content, you want control over how AI systems use it. Anthropic separates training crawlers, user-triggered fetches, and search indexing. Blocking one bot doesn’t block the others. Each choice carries different visibility and training trade-offs. The robots. Anthropic uses three separate user agents: ClaudeBot collects public web content that may be used t…

Google is rolling out a significant update to how average daily budgets pace in campaigns that use ad scheduling — and it could materially change monthly spend totals. What’s happening. Starting March 1, 2026, Google Ads will begin proactively pacing budgets to spend up to the full 30.4x monthly limit, even if campaigns only run on specific days via ad scheduling. How it works: The 2x daily overspend rule stays in place. The 30.4x average daily budget monthly cap remains unchanged. Campaigns will not run outside scheduled hours. But Google will now attempt to hit the full monthly ceiling within the allowed schedule. Why we care. Until now, ad…

Google introduced a new availability value in Google Merchant Center — built specifically for vehicle sellers who don’t carry every model on the lot. The new attribute, “build to order,” lets dealers flag vehicles that aren’t physically in inventory but can be customized and ordered by customers. What needs to change. Sellers must update two areas: their structured data (set availability to BuildToOrder) and their Merchant Center feed (set availability to build to order). Consistency between structured data and feed submissions is critical to avoid disapprovals. [availability] Why we care. Until now, sellers had limited ways to signal that a vehicle wasn’t avai…

“Content is king” remains one of the most widely accepted ideas in SEO. Not everyone has agreed. Different schools of thought have always existed, with some practitioners prioritizing backlinks and others focusing on technical SEO. Content is often treated as the primary driver of search visibility. I’m not arguing that. My point is simpler: if you’ve relied on content to drive results — and earn a living — you should start doubling down on distribution. With AI search changing the game, creating great content (and, yes, building some backlinks) is no longer enough to get it seen. The more important question may no longer be “What should I write next?” but “W…

Every few weeks, a new study drops declaring that Reddit (or YouTube, or Wikipedia) is the most important source for AI citations. Marketers share it. Clients ask about it. Someone starts drafting a Reddit strategy. Because it does. These analyses often flatten the nuance of prompt intent, model differences, and vertical context into a single headline number, and brands jump to start building strategies and teams around benchmarks that have nothing to do with their actual category or customer journey. The shiny object problem in AI search is real, and it’s getting more expensive. Tinuiti’s Q1 2026 AI Citation Trends Report (Disclosure: I’m the senior director …

Long sales cycles, low conversion volume, and multi-stage purchase journeys make measurement and attribution harder, creating real obstacles to campaign optimization. For B2Bs and brands selling high-ticket items, this is the reality. A campaign launched today may take weeks or even months to show revenue, retention, or lifetime value – delaying your ability to use those measurements to refine bidding and targeting. That’s where proxy metrics – also known as soft metrics, or micro-conversions – can come into play. Let’s dig into proxy metrics. What are proxy metrics? Proxy metrics are early indicators of future outcomes. They give you a way to …

Google announced new weekly and monthly views within the Google Search Console performance reports adds weekly and monthly views. This gives you more granular data and analysis of your reports over a longer period of time, and not just the 24-hour view. What it looks like. Here are photos I took from the announcement which took place at the Google Search Central event in Zurich this morning: Why we care. This is a small update but it gives SEOs, publishers and site owners access to more granular data. It may help you dive in and see why you saw a change in your performance data on a specific month, week or day. View the full article

Missed the final SEO Update by Yoast of 2025? Our in-house principal SEOs, Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, broke down December’s biggest search shifts, from Gemini’s integration to Google’s publisher deals, and answered your burning questions. Don’t forget to watch the replay and sign up for the next edition! Watch the full replay below (or read on for the highlights). 2025 in a nutshell: The three biggest SEO shifts 2025 was the year AI officially took over search. Here’s what mattered most: From rankings to retrieval: AI overviews and chat interfaces made being cited more important than ranking #1. EEAT became non-negotiable: Google (and users) demand…

Did you know that duplicate content can hurt your visibility within AI Search? Fabrice Canel and Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft explained that with AI Search, having duplicate content makes it harder for the systems to understand signals which reduces “the likelihood that the correct version will be selected or summarized.” This is not too different from how duplicate content or very similar content can cause issues for ranking in traditional search. That is, because AI Search, on Bing and Google, are grounded by the same signals that are used in traditional search – having duplicate content can potentially cause confusion and blur intent signals. The issue with …

Meta is rolling out ads on its Threads app to all users worldwide, starting next week, with a gradual rollout expected to take months. Threads, Meta’s X rival, has grown rapidly since its July 2023 debut, now surpassing 400 million monthly active users. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly praised the app as a potential “next big hit,” projecting it could reach 1 billion users in a few years. Advertiser access. Advertisers have been able to test Threads ads in the U.S. and Japan over the past year, and last April the platform opened ad access to global advertisers. Meta is making it easy to expand campaigns to Threads via its Advantage+ program or manual campaigns, …

Some Google Ads advertisers are seeing a bug that causes the option to add notes to disappear from the account change popup, making it harder to document optimizations and performance shifts. The issue was flagged by paid search consultant Odi Caspi, who says the problem has appeared intermittently over the past couple of weeks. What advertisers should be seeing: Caspi shares his view below: Why we care. Account notes are a key workflow tool for agencies and in-house teams tracking changes over time. Losing easy access to notes makes troubleshooting performance swings harder and weakens institutional memory across teams. What users are seeing. …

On episode 338 of PPC Live The Podcast, I speak to Nick Handley Paid Media Lead at Impression, about one of the most formative mistakes of his career — and why those early errors often shape the strongest marketers. The podcast series focuses on PPC professionals’ biggest “F-ups,” but never without exploring how they recovered, who helped them, and what lasting lessons came out the other side. Nick’s story is a textbook example of how a single mistake can permanently change how you work — for the better. The Black Friday mistake that took everything down Nick takes listeners back nearly ten years, to the very start of his career at Tyres on the Drive (now owned…

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…

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…

There’s a dangerous misconception in B2B marketing that video is just a “brand awareness” play. We tend to bucket video into two extremes: The “viral” top-of-funnel asset that gets views but no leads. The dry bottom-of-funnel product demo that gets leads but no views. This binary thinking is breaking your pipeline. In my role at LinkedIn, I have access to a unique view of the B2B buying ecosystem. What the data shows is that the most successful companies don’t treat video as a tactic for one stage of the funnel. They treat it as a multiplier. When you integrate video strategy across the entire buying journey – connecting brand to demand – effectivene…

You’re tracking the wrong numbers – and so is almost everyone else in SEO right now. We’ve all been there. You present a chart showing organic traffic up 47%, only to get blank stares from the CMO who wants to know why revenue hasn’t budged. Or you celebrate a top-three ranking for a keyword nobody’s actually searching for anymore. The metrics that made you look good in 2019 are actively misleading your decision-making in 2026. With AI Overviews dominating search results, zero-click searches becoming the norm, and personalized SERPs making traditional rankings less meaningful, sticking with outdated measurements puts your strategy and budget at risk. Let’…

Search Console is a free gift from Google for SEO professionals that tells you how your website is performing. It’s the closest thing to X-ray vision we can get. With data-packed amenities, SEO professionals can scavenge through to locate stashes of hidden nuggets like clicks and impressions from search queries, Core Web Vitals, and whatever other surprises lie within your website. Custom regex filters take you around your million-page website. And while all SEO professionals hope to avoid any catastrophic SEO-related events with Google’s AI Overview, all we can really do is be prepared. For starters, keep reading this guide below on Search Console. …

When you hear the term “contact page,” you probably think of a simple page containing contact info and maybe a form. I’m here to tell you why that’s a big miss from a local SEO perspective and show you how to build a contact page that builds your prominence with Google and helps you convert more leads. Google pays special attention to your contact page The former head of Google Business Profile Support, Joel Headley, once told me that Google specifically crawls and parses your contact page to gather information about your business. This led me to realize that most businesses have awful contact pages. They list their name, address, and phone number (NAP), e…

ChatGPT’s emerging ad ecosystem is gaining momentum, according to new monitoring from AI ad intelligence firm Adthena — with more brands appearing, clearer trigger patterns, and evolving ad placements. What’s happening. After initially identifying the first advertisers inside ChatGPT last week, Adthena now reports a noticeable ramp-up in advertiser participation and ad delivery behavior. Advertisers spotted so far: Best Buy AT&T Pottery Barn Enterprise Qualcomm Expedia How ads are triggering. Based on a sample of 1,500+ prompts analyzed over the past week: Most ads appear on the first prompt. Some only trigger on the third o…

Somewhere inside your CRM is a customer who does not exist. They open emails at impossible hours. They redeem promotions with machine-like precision. They browse product pages across three devices in under five minutes. They convert, unsubscribe, re-engage and transact again. On paper, they look highly active. In reality, they may be a composite of behaviors stitched together from AI assistants, shared accounts, recycled addresses, autofill tools and automated workflows. This is the Data Doppelgänger Problem. And it is about to become one of the most expensive blind spots in modern marketing. For years, identity resolution was framed as a hygiene issue. Clean …

ChatGPT retrieves far more webpages than it cites. A new AirOps analysis found that 85% of discovered sources never appear in the final answer. Why we care. If you want your content cited in AI-generated answers, discovery isn’t enough. Most retrieved pages never become visible to users. Key finding. In AI answers, retrieval doesn’t equal citation. Your page can rank and be retrieved yet still lose the citation to a source that better matches the prompt or supporting context. This shifts optimization toward earning selection inside the AI synthesis process—not just appearing in search results, per the report. By the numbers: 82,108 citations appeared…