SEO Tools and Resources

SEO tools were the most replaced martech application in 2025 — but not for the reason you might expect. According to the 2025 MarTech Replacement Survey, SEO platforms topped the list of replaced tools for the first time, overtaking categories like marketing automation platforms (MAPs), which had led for the past five years. At first glance, that might suggest instability in SEO. After all, the discipline is being reshaped by LLMs, AI-generated answers, and the rise of zero-click search experiences — all of which challenge traditional keyword tracking and ranking-based workflows. But the data tells a more nuanced story. SEO tools: most replaced, but stabil…

SEO keeps evolving faster than most of us can handle. If you’re finding it hard to keep up with all the changes in search, you’re not the only one. I’ve talked to dozens of marketing teams this quarter, and they all tell me the same thing: the old SEO playbook just isn’t working anymore. Whether you’re running your company’s search strategy or working with clients, you need a smarter approach that puts users first and works across all the places people search online. This guide shows you key areas that are driving SEO success right now in 2025. It’s based on what’s working for the most successful marketing teams I work with. You’ll get practical ti…

If you feel like you’re being pulled in different directions with your SEO program, you aren’t alone. How do you know where to focus first for the most impact? And when that’s done, what do you do next? It can be challenging to decide which SEO tasks to prioritize because they all impact the end user in some way – but some more than others. This is where discernment comes into play. This article will help you build a path to get your SEO program organized from point A to point B and figure out how to prioritize tasks to get ROI quicker. Frameworks for identifying high-impact SEO opportunities When every SEO task feels urgent, knowing where to focus fi…

Picture this: Your company relies on Data Studio for SEO reporting. It’s right before your next big meeting when you’re planning to present results… but Data Studio has an outage (again) and suddenly you have nothing to show. That’s embarrassing. And it happens more than it should. It wasn’t even a year ago that I touted the benefits of Looker Studio (now Data Studio) for SEO reporting. Now the platform feels archaic compared to the agentic coding tools available today. Here’s how rigid SEO dashboards like those produced in Data Studio are holding you back and why code-driven SEO reporting is the only way to remain efficient and competitive. The pr…

AI has made it easier than ever to scale SEO fast – but with it comes high risk. What happens when the party is over and short-term wins become long-term losses? Recently, I worked with a site that had expanded aggressively using AI-powered programmatic. It worked until it didn’t, resulting in a steep decline in rankings, which I doubt they will recover. It’s not worth the fallout when the party is over. And, eventually, it will be. Here are the lessons learned along the way and ways to approach things differently. When the party ends The risks of AI-driven content strategies aren’t always immediately apparent. In this case, the signs were …

2026 is around the corner – and the SEO space has never been this noisy. Every day brings something new. It’s easy to get stuck in panic mode, worrying you’re missing the next big thing, or to spend hours scrolling LinkedIn threads that lead nowhere. In both cases, you end up with nothing concrete – and with stakeholders still expecting clear impact. As we head into 2026, the real challenge is building a strategy with discipline – one that cuts through the noise and balances: Short-term wins that prove impact and build trust. Long-term bets that future-proof visibility. The boring but essential, business-as-usual (BAU) tasks that keep your foundati…

SEO is at a crossroads. As AI reshapes the digital landscape and Google continues to drive less traffic to brands, marketers face a critical challenge: how to balance strategies that deliver results today with innovations that prepare for tomorrow. This article outlines eight key considerations to help you navigate these changes and stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of SEO. Why SEO feels overwhelming right now In 2024, five of the top 15 SEO stories on Search Engine Land were about AI, with several others covering major changes at Google that have led to less traffic being sent to brands. These shifts leave us with a lot to think about. Studies a…

SEO never stands still, and neither do we here at Yoast. In our November 2025 edition of the SEO Update by Yoast, our principal SEOs, Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, broke down the latest shifts in search, structured data, and AI. Whether you’re running an e-commerce store, managing a content-heavy site, or just keeping up with Google’s ever-changing rules, this edition highlights what actually matters. Google updates Google is refining its search results, phasing out certain structured data features, including FAQ snippets and COVID-19 updates. But that doesn’t mean you should strip structured data from your site. It still plays a role behind the scenes, especiall…

Look, I get it. Every time a new search technology appears, we try to map it to what we already know. When mobile search exploded, we called it “mobile SEO.” When voice assistants arrived, we coined “voice search optimization” and told everyone this would be the new hype. I’ve been doing SEO for years. I know how Google works – or at least I thought I did. Then I started digging into how ChatGPT picks citations, how Perplexity ranks sources, and how Google’s AI Overviews select content. I’m not here to declare that SEO is dead or to state that everything has changed. I’m here to share the questions that keep me up at night – questions that sugg…

SEO and PPC are two of the most important strategies for increasing your website’s visibility. While they both aim to attract more traffic, they operate differently. They also serve different purposes. Here, we’ll discuss SEO vs. Pay-per-click advertising and how to choose the best option for you. Table of contents Understanding SEO and PPC What’s the difference between SEO and PPC? Pros and cons of SEO Pros and cons of PPC Conclusion SEO vs Pay-per-click Understanding SEO and PPC As we all know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It consists of everything you do to get your site higher rankings in the original search results. Those tactics are th…

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…

In June, Fractl and Search Engine Land surveyed 2,000 consumers and uncovered a startling statistic: 82% find AI-powered search more helpful than traditional search. While the SEO industry panicked, thought leaders and snakeoil salesmen took to LinkedIn to lay claim to this new frontier of AI-driven brand visibility: “It’s called GEO!” “No, it’s AEO!” “Oh, we use AISO! Wait, I meant LLMO now!” …Or, maybe, it’s just effective SEO? Industry banter aside, we’ve entered a world where old-school search and AI-driven discovery coexist – and the terminology isn’t trivial. It’s the roadmap for how brands show up across fast-growing search platform…

AI tools and visibility have dominated the SEO conversation in the past two years. But while discussions focus on these new technologies, most of the biggest SEO risks in 2026 will come from somewhere else: within your own organization. Fragmented data, unclear ownership, outdated KPIs, and weak collaboration can quietly destroy even the best strategies. As SEO expands beyond the website and into AI-driven discovery, the role of the SEO team is becoming broader, more influential, and, paradoxically, harder to define. Here are some of the risks your team should start thinking about now. Relying too much on AI for everything Many SEO teams now rely on AI for …

Every few years, SEO gets a shiny new acronym. Voice search. AMP. E-A-T. Each promised to rewrite the rules, and each eventually found its way into the same corporate graveyard of experiments and half-baked roadmaps. I know, because I bought in. For a year and a half, I buried myself in schema markup—building page-level knowledge graphs, connecting entities, mapping relationships until entire sites resembled semantic webs. It was meticulous, elegant, even beautiful in its own way. And it delivered nothing. Not because technical work doesn’t matter—SEO is inherently technical. The issue in enterprise is that Google is a black box. You can pour months into structured da…

You could be ranking in Position 1 and still be completely invisible. I know that sounds counterintuitive. But here’s what’s actually happening: A potential customer opens ChatGPT or Perplexity and asks, “What’s the best [tool/agency/platform] for [your category]?” Your competitor gets mentioned. You don’t. Your No. 1 ranking did absolutely nothing to help you. This is the new SEO reality, and it’s catching many smart marketers off guard. LLMs synthesize consensus across multiple sources, rather than relying on a single source. This means you need corroborating mentions distributed across the web. The game has shifted from ranking to consensus, and if y…

For the best part of two decades, we had a clear and accepted mandate: Get your brand to the top of the search results page. The problem was understood, the success metrics were agreed upon, and a supporting ensemble of tools, talent, and tactics was built around solving it. Rankings were the scoreboard. Position 1 meant visibility. Traffic followed, and a brand’s value seemed to follow it. It’s this core premise that is now under serious renegotiation with the search landscape changing more in the past 18 months than in the previous 10 years combined: AI Overviews are absorbing queries that previously generated clicks. AI/LLM platforms are becoming the…

Running SEO and GEO/AEO audits is an excellent use case for AI, especially with recent models that have agentic capabilities. These models have extensive knowledge bases and can perform multistep processes, such as extracting webpages, reviewing data, and formulating recommendations. But before running your SEO or GEO/AEO audit in Claude or ChatGPT, have you considered whether the model has everything it needs to provide a good response? You might be shocked to discover that state-of-the-art models provide detailed recommendations without the most basic information, including Google SERPs, keyword volumes, or even the ability to fetch URL content. For example: …

Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, admitted that Google “for sure messed up” by underinvesting in AI and failing to seriously pursue the opportunity after releasing the research that led to today’s generative AI era. Driving the news. Google didn’t take it seriously enough and failed to scale fast enough after the Transformer paper, Brin said. Also: Google was “too scared to bring it to people” because chatbots can “say dumb things.” “OpenAI ran with it,” which was “a super smart insight.” The full quote. Brin said: “I guess I would say in some ways we for sure messed up in that we underinvested and sort of didn’t take it as seriously as we should have…

SerpApi is asking a federal court to dismiss Reddit’s lawsuit over alleged scraping of Reddit content from Google Search, saying Reddit is trying to use copyright law to control user posts and public search results. The motion follows Reddit’s amended complaint filed in February. SerpApi says the filing still fails to show copyright ownership, circumvention of technical protections, or concrete harm. SerpApi’s argument. SerpApi CEO Julien Khaleghy, in a blog post today, argued the lawsuit fails for several reasons: Reddit doesn’t own most of the content at issue. Its user agreement states that users retain ownership. Reddit holds only a non-exclusive …

SerpAPI said it will “vigorously defend” itself after being sued by Reddit for allegedly scraping and reselling data from the platform via Google Search results. The response. SerpAPI called Reddit’s language “inflammatory” and said it was “extremely disappointed” to learn of the lawsuit without prior communication. “Our work is guided by a simple principle: public search data should be accessible,” the company said. SerpAPI argued its position is backed by the First Amendment and called Reddit’s actions a threat to “the free and open Web we all enjoy.” What they’re saying. According to SerpApi: “For eight years, SerpApi has operated transparently and…

SerpApi is asking a federal court to dismiss Google’s lawsuit, arguing the company is misusing copyright law to restrict access to public search results. The motion was filed Feb. 20, according to a blog post by SerpApi CEO and founder Julien Khaleghy. Google sued SerpApi in December, alleging it bypassed technical protections to scrape and resell content from Google Search. The details: SerpApi argues Google is improperly invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). According to Khaleghy: The DMCA protects copyrighted works, not websites or ad businesses. Google doesn’t own the underlying content displayed in search results. Accessing pub…

Content marketing is everywhere. We do keyword research, analyse markets, and publish landing pages and blog posts. The goal? To attract clicks, convert users, and climb the rankings. But what happens when that stops working? The internet is drowning in generic, AI-generated material. Search is becoming ambient, answer-led, and keyword-less. And search engines no longer need to crawl or rank your site to serve users. In fact, they’d often prefer not to. In these ‘solved query spaces’, answers are synthesised. Content is commodified. The old tactics don’t work anymore. If we want to reach and influence audiences, we need a new approach. We must st…

Even when it ranks in Position 1, Mail Online loses over half its clicks when AI Overviews appear in Google’s search results. Calling the click-through rate (CTR) “pretty shocking” Carly Steven, SEO and editorial ecommerce director for the UK newspaper, told the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress (as reported by PressGazette): “On desktop, when we are ranking number one in organic search, it [clickthrough] effectively is about 13% on desktop and about 20% on mobile. When we are still ranking number one organically but there is an AI Overview present, that drops to less than 5% on desktop and 7% on mobile, so a pretty profound change in clickthrough.” Why we c…

Google Ad Grants accounts can now optimize for real-world foot traffic. Advertisers using the nonprofit program are able to set “shop visits” as an account-level goal — a move that enables campaigns to optimize toward in-person visits. Driving the news. Previously, attempting to mark shop visits as a goal inside Ad Grants would trigger an error. That restriction appears to have been lifted, allowing eligible accounts to include store visit conversions in their primary goal configuration. The update means nonprofits and local organizations can now align bidding and optimization with physical visits — particularly impactful for visibility in Maps placements and …

Shopify is experiencing a major login outage on one of the peak shopping days of the holiday season, leaving merchants unable to access their dashboards, POS systems, mobile apps, or even contact Shopify Support. What’s happening. Shopify’s status page shows a series of escalating alerts beginning at 14:54 UTC, warning that merchants “may experience issues when trying to login.” Minutes later, the platform confirmed the outage affects POS, mobile logins, and support access. By 15:26 UTC, Shopify urged merchants to stay logged in on any devices that are currently active to avoid further complications. Why we care. A login outage during a top-tier sale…