SEO Tools and Resources

OpenAI is launching Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT to Plus, Pro, and Free users in the U.S. Users will be able to buy products from Etsy sellers. Purchases are powered by the new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed with Stripe. How it works. Users search in plain language (e.g., “gifts for a ceramics lover”). Then: ChatGPT returns product recommendations ranked by relevance, not payment. If an item supports Instant Checkout, users tap “Buy,” confirm shipping and payment details, and complete the order without leaving chat. Orders, payments, and fulfillment run through the merchant’s existing systems; ChatGPT just passes information secure…

OpenAI is updating its privacy policy with new details on ads, data usage and upcoming features across its products, including ChatGPT. The update was shared with ChatGPT users and outlines how advertising will work inside ChatGPT — and what data advertisers can and cannot access. Why we care. OpenAI’s update makes it clear that user privacy is a top priority: personal chats, histories, and details are never shared with advertisers. Ads can still be personalized using anonymized engagement signals, meaning brands can reach relevant audiences without compromising sensitive data. This approach lets advertisers measure performance safely while building trust…

ChatGPT now has more than 900 million weekly active users, OpenAI announced. This is the first time OpenAI has publicly cited the 900 million weekly active user mark. Why we care. User behavior continues to fragment beyond traditional search. If 900 million people use ChatGPT weekly, discovery, research, and product comparisons are increasingly happening within AI interfaces. That said, many of those actions tend to lead users to traditional search for confirmation. The details. OpenAI shared the figure of 900 million weekly active users while announcing a new $110 billion funding round. The company also reported more than 50 million consumer subscribers and over …

OpenAI is pushing ahead with advertising on ChatGPT, but early adopters say the platform is far from ready for serious performance marketing. The big picture. According to a report by The Information, ChatGPT’s ad offering shares almost no data with advertisers, lacks automated buying tools, and offers very limited targeting — leaving brands with little ability to measure whether their spend is actually doing anything. What advertisers are dealing with. Digital marketer Glenn Gabe helped list out what the current issues are: No automated way to buy ad space — deals are being made over phone calls, emails, and spreadsheets No meaningful performance data to …

OpenAI is backing away from putting checkout directly inside ChatGPT. Instead, purchases will shift to retailer apps that connect to ChatGPT, The Information reported. Why we care. ChatGPT aims to be more than a discovery engine. Right now, though, product discovery inside ChatGPT is gaining traction faster than purchases. That suggests AI-powered shopping is only influencing the consideration stage (at least for now), not driving conversions. What happened. OpenAI had planned to let shoppers buy products directly from listings in ChatGPT search results. Instead, an OpenAI spokesperson said that Instant Checkout is moving to Apps, where purchases happen inside con…

Search behavior keeps tilting toward AI answers. People still click classic results, but more are starting with AI summaries and only clicking when they want depth, proof, or tools. Your job as an SEO is now twofold: Rank in traditional search. Get your pages cited or summarized inside AI experiences. How do you do both without doubling your workload? How AI-powered search surfaces and cites content Before diving into tactics, it’s worth grounding in what’s actually confirmed about how AI search experiences pull and cite results. AI-powered search engines ground their answers in indexed, high-quality pages Google AI Overviews and AI M…

Table of contents What are product variations in ecommerce? Why do product variations matter for customers? How do product variations support your ecommerce SEO strategies? Increase in keyword targeting Richer content for search engines and AI engines Improved user engagement and longer sessions Better structured data for enhanced search results Blueprint for optimizing your product variations Technical implementation of product variations Media content optimization for ecommerce product variations SEO tips for product variations Common product variation ecommerce errors to avoid Ready to unfold all variations? Product variations are more than just an ecomm…

Change is the only constant – a truth marketers, especially those in SEO, know all too well. The search landscape is shifting faster than ever, with AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini reshaping how people find and interact with information. Yet, despite all the innovation, the core principles of SEO remain as relevant as ever. While AI-enhanced search engines may seem like a revolutionary leap, they still rely on the foundational elements that have driven search success for years. This article explores how time-tested SEO strategies – like site structure, indexing, and keyword optimization – still play a crucial role in an AI-d…

OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is more than a new ecommerce channel. By adding structured merchant feeds directly into ChatGPT, it changes how products are discovered and purchased in conversational search – and opens new opportunities for marketers. This shift moves us closer to real differentiators for generative engine optimization (GEO). Influence now occurs not only on pages but also within the structured data that conversational agents can consume, validate, and rank. While that’s been partly true for Google, ChatGPT introduces important differences we’ll unpack here. Why feeds in ChatGPT represent a new model While Google relies …

If your organic traffic is down but impressions are up, AI is likely citing your content without sending clicks. If both are down, you’re being ignored. Either way, the search behavior your marketing strategy was built on has changed, and waiting for traffic to rebound isn’t a strategy. This is the reality you’re facing in 2026. According to KEO Marketing: 73% of B2B websites saw significant traffic losses between 2024 and 2025, with an average 34% year-over-year decline. The impact isn’t evenly distributed. If your content is primarily informational, you’ve likely been hit harder, with some sectors seeing organic traffic drop 15% to 64% since AI Overviews la…

Organic search traffic is down just 2.5% year over year — nowhere near the 25% to 60% drops often cited in industry commentary. That’s one big takeaway from a new large-scale analysis by Graphite using Similarweb data from more than 40,000 of the largest U.S. websites. This finding challenges the idea that generative AI tools like ChatGPT are rapidly replacing traditional search and gutting SEO. What’s happening. Surveys, anecdotes, and case studies have fueled claims that organic traffic has collapsed and large language models are pulling demand away from search engines. Graphite’s data tells a different story. Using Similarweb visit data, the study compared…

Traditional search engines rely on countless ranking signals to deliver the most relevant answers to users. In the age of AI, signals appear to be simpler – at least for now. Court documents from Google’s antitrust case reveal that AI Overviews rely on lighter signals and fewer documents in the index. However, content clarity and topical connections are more important than ever. To be visible in the era of AI search requires content that is: Well-structured, so that relationships between topics are clear. Expertly written, so that the meaning and depth are obvious. Machine-readable, so entities and relationships are easy to interpret. In…

When the rules change, smart players adjust their strategy. Google Ads has changed a lot since it first launched. But shifting PPC strategies isn’t always easy. What happens if the rules change and you don’t know about it? Or you’re too confused by the new rules to take decisive action? Here’s how to adapt to changes in Google Ads while keeping your competitive edge and sanity. Google Ads stacks the deck in its own favor Google Ads constantly makes changes to increase its revenue. If there were a Serenity principle for advertisers, it might be: “Grant me the clarity to accept the Google Ads changes I can’t control, the knowledge to push back on the…

If you’re not actively managing your branded search campaigns, you’re leaving money on the table and your reputation in the hands of competitors, review aggregators, and affiliate marketers. Brand protection through PPC isn’t just about bidding on your own name. It’s a strategy that spans defensive bidding, query monitoring, ad copy testing, and reputation management across the entire customer research journey. Why brand search deserves more than basic defense Most PPC managers treat brand campaigns as an afterthought. Set up a campaign, bid on the exact brand name, maybe add some close variants, and call it done. But the reality is far more complex, espe…

Ever wondered why some of your ecommerce products or blog posts never appear on Google? The way your site handles pagination could be the reason. This article explores the complexities of pagination – what it is, whether your site needs it for SEO, and how it affects search in 2025. What is pagination? Examples of pagination in action. Why is pagination important for SEO? Google’s deprecation of rel=prev/next. Why pagination is still important in 2025: The infinite scroll debate. How JavaScript can interfere with pagination. How to handle indexing and canonical tags for paginated URLs. What is pagination? Pagination is the coding an…

We’re being pushed harder than ever — expected to hit bigger revenue targets with the same or smaller PPC budgets. Even with flat budgets, rising platform costs mean we’re effectively facing a budget cut. Average CPCs have risen by as much as 40%, with an average of 3.74%, per Wordstream. Certain periods, such as Black Friday, see much higher increases. Teams are experiencing budget cuts, with average marketing budgets flatlining at 7.7%, according to Gartner. Our own account audits show that 20-30% of most accounts’ spend is quietly underperforming. This is the reality of paid media in 2026. But it isn’t all bad news. Efficiency isn’t just about spending l…

Organic search clicks are shrinking across major verticals — and it’s not just because of Google’s AI Overviews. Classic organic click share fell sharply across headphones, jeans, greeting cards, and online games queries in the U.S., new Similarweb data comparing January 2025 to January 2026 shows. The biggest winner: text ads. Why we care. You aren’t just competing with AI Overviews. You’re competing with Google’s aggressive expansion of paid search real estate. Across every vertical analyzed, text ads gained more click share than any other measurable surface. In product categories, paid listings now capture roughly one-third of all clicks. As a result, seve…

For over two decades, parked domains generated income for advertisers and publishers. Recent Google Ads policy changes restricting ads on parked, expired, or mistyped domains show that nothing lasts forever. If industry shifts have affected you, this article may interest you. Today, we’ll take a deeper look at domain monetization and whether you can still stabilize and optimize income from domain traffic. The domain market shake-up In 2025, Google began rolling out significant changes to its Search Partner Network to improve inventory quality. These updates tightened controls and limited ad delivery across parked, expired, and mistyped domains. That process…

As SERPs continue to change, we see more search features taking up space on Page 1. That’s why it’s increasingly important to gain visibility in People Also Ask results. Let’s go over some ways to research People Also Ask (PAA) rankings, and methods you can use in order to get a website ranking in them. What is the People Also Ask box? This accordioned box shows a list of questions related to the query that you searched. You can expand the accordions to find out more information and click through to different links. In some cases, AI Overviews results can appear within an expanded PAA box. See below: So, if you have a shoe company but are…

Google is rolling out a beta feature that lets advertisers run structured A/B tests on creative assets within a single Performance Max asset group. Advertisers can split traffic between two asset sets and measure performance in a controlled experiment. Why we care. Creative testing inside Performance Max has mostly relied on guesswork. Google’s new native A/B asset experiments bring controlled testing directly into PMax — without spinning up separate campaigns. How it works. Advertisers choose one Performance Max campaign and asset group, then define a control asset set (existing creatives) and a treatment set (new alternatives). Shared assets can run across both …

Over the past few years, Performance Max has gone from an opaque experiment to a more capable — though still imperfect — campaign type for B2B marketers. The fundamentals haven’t changed: skepticism still matters, first-party data is critical, experimentation is non-negotiable, and actionable reporting drives optimization. What has changed is how much better Google has gotten at operationalizing those inputs. That means your Performance Max strategy needs to adapt. Here are five best practices for running more effective PMax campaigns for B2B today. 1. Guide AI with the right inputs In 2022, given the automated nature of PMax campaigns and the aggressive wa…

Performance Max has come a long way since its rocky launch. Many advertisers once dismissed it as a half-baked product, but Google has spent the past 18 months fixing real issues around transparency and control. If you wrote Performance Max off before, it’s time to take another look. Mike Ryan, head of ecommerce insights at Smarter Ecommerce, explained why at the latest SMX Next. Taking a fresh look at Performance Max Performance Max traces its roots to Smart Shopping campaigns, which Google rolled out with red carpet fanfare at Google Marketing Live in 2019. Even then, industry experts warned that transparency and control would become serious issues. The…

Perplexity is abandoning advertising, for now at least. The company believes sponsored placements — even labeled ones — risk undermining the trust on which its AI answer engine depends. Perplexity phased out the ads it began testing in 2024 and has no plans to bring them back, the Financial Times reported. The AI search company could revisit advertising or “never ever need to do ads,” the report said. Why we care. If Perplexity remains ad-free, brands lose paid access to a fast-growing audience. The company previously reported that it gets 780 million monthly queries. With sponsored placements gone, brands have no way to get visibility inside Perplexity’s answ…

Perplexity’s new Comet browser for iOS defaults to Google Search. That’s because mobile queries often focus on navigation, local results, and transactions, where “Google does a much better job … than anyone else … including Perplexity,” according to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. Comet for iOS. It includes Perplexity’s AI assistant directly in the browser. Comet for iOS also blends AI answers with standard search results. For many queries, you’ll still see a traditional results page. You can ask questions by voice while browsing. The assistant can summarize pages, answer questions, and take actions like drafting emails. Deep Research features generate cit…

Google has introduced “Personal Intelligence” in the Gemini app as a beta which allows Gemini to give you a more personalized response by connecting across your Google ecosystem, including Google Search, Gmail, Photos, and your YouTube history. Google said this is “Launching as a beta in the U.S., this marks our next step toward making Gemini more personal, proactive and powerful.” This will also be coming to Search in AI Mode soon, Google told us. While Gemini could already retrieve information from these apps, with Gemini 3, it can now reason across your data to surface proactive insights. Here is how it looks. Here is a video of how it works: Avai…