SEO Tools and Resources

In a recent keynote at the Industrial Marketing Summit, Rand Fishkin argued that we’re marketing in a “zero-click world.” His observation captures an important surface-level trend: fewer users are clicking through to websites. The deeper shift, however, is structural. What has changed is the way information is evaluated, repeated, and trusted across the web — and that’s where many are drawing the wrong conclusion. As clicks decline, it can look like websites matter less. In reality, their role in shaping what gets seen and trusted may be increasing. Why ‘zero-click’ discussions often lead to the wrong conclusion From a traffic perspective, the trend is unmi…

AI citations in ChatGPT are far more concentrated than citation distributions in traditional search. Roughly 30 domains capture 67% of citations within a topic. That’s according to Kevin Indig’s latest study, which also found that broad topical coverage, long-form pages, and cluster-based models outperform the old “one keyword, one page” approach. The details. Citation visibility wasn’t evenly distributed. In product comparison topics, the top 10 domains accounted for 46% of citations; the top 30, 67%. AI visibility was slightly less concentrated than classic organic search, but still highly centralized. Indig’s conclusion: you’re effectively shut out u…

For the past several years, marketing strategy has reorganized itself around a simple premise. Third-party data is fading. Privacy expectations are rising. The solution, we are told, is first-party data. Collect more of it. Centralize it. Build the customer view around it. In many ways, the shift was necessary. Direct relationships with customers are more durable than rented audiences. Consent and transparency matter. Organizations that invested early in their own data ecosystems are better positioned today than those that relied entirely on external signals. But the industry’s confidence in first-party data has grown so strong that it now obscures a more comp…

While initially criticized as a black box, Performance Max has evolved into a fairly critical campaign type. With each passing quarter, Google has introduced more functionality and visibility. Additional reporting is helpful, but what matters is what you can actually act on. While you can’t control everything in Performance Max, there are specific levers that can have a meaningful impact on performance. Here are the parts of PMax you can control and how to use them effectively. Control what you can: Search terms and placements One of the most exciting updates in the last year to Performance Max has been the ability to add these campaign-level negative keywords.…

Automated traffic grew 23.5% year over year in 2025 — about eight times faster than human traffic, which rose 3.1%, according to HUMAN Security’s State of AI Traffic report. AI-driven traffic appears to be a major contributor to that growth, with average monthly volume increasing 187% year over year, while traffic from AI agents and agentic browsers (e.g., OpenAI’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet) grew nearly 8,000% year over year. Automated traffic is defined in the report as: “All internet traffic generated by software systems rather than human users, including traditional automation such as search engine crawlers, monitoring bots, and conventional scraping tools, as …

Refreshing creatives for every seasonal moment just got significantly faster — Google has quietly launched Asset Group Theming inside Performance Max, letting advertisers apply seasonal themes to existing asset groups without rebuilding from scratch. How it works. Advertisers can clone a high-performing asset group and apply a theme — Google then generates themed image variations and suggests aligned headlines and descriptions, while leaving the original asset group completely untouched for safe testing. Available themes cover. Promotional: Sale, Studio/Editorial Seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall Cultural moments: Christmas, Black Friday/Cyber M…

OpenAI have been pumping out the ads ads for free-tier ChatGPT users in the US for over a month now, and early testing suggests they’re more frequent and more targeted than many users might expect. How often they appear. In a test of 500 questions across the mobile app, roughly one in five questions in a new conversation thread triggered an ad at the bottom of ChatGPT’s response — always as a website link button, always tailored to the topic of the question. What kind of ads appeared. The range was broad — dog food, hotel bookings, productivity software, cruise vacations, streaming services, corporate credit cards, AI coding tools, and basketball tickets, among ot…

The OpenAI GPT Store launched in January 2024 with more than 3 million custom GPTs. Ask any team how many they still use, and the answer is usually zero or one. Most business GPTs fail because they’re built like novelties rather than tools. They’re too broad, under-tested, and launched without a strategy, so they never become part of a team’s workflow. I’ve built and audited 12+ custom GPTs across marketing, SEO, and sales teams. The pattern is consistent: a small number get used daily, while most collect dust. Here’s how to build GPTs that do — from validating the right use case to structuring, testing, and launching in a way that drives real adoption. …

You’ve worked hard to build your product catalog. The last thing you want is AI tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini describing your products inaccurately to potential customers. AI tools don’t browse your whole store the way a search engine does. They grab what they can find, quickly, and fill in the gaps. For a store with a large catalog, that means incomplete answers, outdated information, or worse, sending shoppers to a competitor. The new llms.txt feature, available in Yoast SEO for Shopify bridges that gap. What does it actually do? It creates a file that tells AI tools which parts of your store matter most: your top products, your collections, you…

In 1998, submitting a website to search engines was manual, methodical, and genuinely tedious. I remember 17 of them: AltaVista, Yahoo Directory, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, HotBot, Northern Light, Ask Jeeves, DMOZ, Snap, LookSmart, GoTo.com, AllTheWeb, Inktomi, iWon, and About.com. Each had its own form, process, and wait time, and its own quiet judgment about whether your URL was worth including. We submitted manually, 18,000 pages in all. Yawn. Google was barely a year old when we were doing this. But they were already building the thing that would make submission irrelevant. PageRank meant Google followed links, and a site that other sites linke…

Google Ads quietly added an auto-apply setting to its experiments feature — and it’s turned on by default, meaning winning experiment variants can be automatically pushed live without manual review. How it works. Advertisers can choose between two modes — directional results (the default) or statistical significance at 80%, 85%, or 95% confidence levels. There is one built-in safeguard: if a chosen success metric performs significantly worse in the test arm, the change won’t be automatically applied. Why we care. Experiments are one of the most powerful tools in a Google Ads account. Automating the apply step could speed up testing cycles, but it also removes …

Tracking your brand’s visibility in AI-powered search is the new frontier of SEO. The tools built to do this are expensive, often starting at $300 to $500 per month and quickly rising from there. For many, that price is a nonstarter, especially when custom testing needs go beyond what off-the-shelf software can handle. I faced this exact problem. I needed a specific tool, and it didn’t exist at a price I could afford, so I decided to build it myself. I’m not a developer. I spent a weekend talking to an AI agent in plain English, and the result was a working AI search visibility tracker that does exactly what I need. Below is the guide I wish I’d had when I started…

In this case study, we went deep instead of broad. We focused on one question: why wasn’t a brand present in a single ChatGPT prompt across ~70 iterations? We chose one prompt: “What are the best hotels in New York City?” We analyzed mentions, citations, fanouts, and SERPs in Google and Bing. We also planned to analyze GPT memory, but it made no discernible difference to mentions, citations, or fanouts. What we did and what we found We chose NYC hotels because it’s a crowded, mature market with juggernauts and up-and-comers. We also have no connection to the NYC luxury hotel space — we intentionally picked an area where we could stay objective and learn fr…

If you rank your own product #1 in “best of” listicles, it’s not just a search-quality issue — it may violate FTC rules that took effect in October 2024. Driving the news. As Lily Ray noted on LinkedIn, the FTC’s Consumer Review Rule (16 CFR Part 465) prohibits several deceptive practices tied to reviews and testimonials, including: Presenting company-controlled content as independent reviews. Publishing reviews of products or services never actually used. Attributing reviews to people who didn’t write them. Penalties can reach up to $53,088 per violation, and each page may count separately. Ray also shared a reference table she generated with the help …

For most people, “Mad Men” means the TV show. But the phrase points to something more specific: Madison Avenue in the 1950s and ‘60s, when agencies grew brands through persuasion, positioning, and earned trust in a world of scarce media channels and powerful gatekeepers. If you wanted attention, you bought your way in, then made your product the obvious choice. When the internet arrived and Google made the chaos navigable, an entire industry was built on getting brands found. Search and SEO became one of the most commercially valuable disciplines in marketing. That model isn’t disappearing. But something new is taking shape on top of it — and most of the industry …

Over 30% of outbound clicks go to just 10 domains, with Google alone taking more than 20%, according to a new Semrush study published today. ChatGPT also relies less on the live web, triggering search on 34.5% of queries, down from 46% in late 2024. The big picture. ChatGPT’s growth has plateaued, and its role in how users navigate the web is evolving unevenly. Referral traffic from ChatGPT grew 206%, comparing January 2025 to January 2026. The details. Most ChatGPT referral traffic still goes to a small set of sites, even as more sites receive some traffic. Google accounts for 21.6% of all ChatGPT referral traffic. The next nine domains bring the…

Google says its AI-powered advertising tools are starting to deliver meaningful results, including major revenue gains for some retailers, as it experiments with how ads work in AI-driven search. The big picture. Fears that AI chatbots like ChatGPT would disrupt Google’s core search business haven’t materialized, and instead the company’s ads business continues to grow, suggesting AI may be expanding how people search rather than replacing it. By the numbers: Alphabet Inc. surpassed $400 billion in revenue in 2025. Q4 ad revenue: $82.28 billion (+13.5% YoY). YouTube ads: $11.38 billion (+~9% YoY). What’s happened. Google is embedding ads into its A…

You’re facing a major shift as familiar manual targeting levers disappear in favor of AI-driven discovery. Platforms’ automated tools are collapsing campaign types, obscuring data, and replacing manual targeting with intent-based algorithms. This is a shift from selection to prediction. You won’t adapt by holding onto old controls — you’ll adapt by learning to engineer the inputs that replace them. Here’s how to make sure you have the tools to stay on top. The end of manual targeting as you knew it You previously relied on granular keyword lists, demographic filters, and custom exclusions to target ideal customers. You told platforms exactly who to target and p…

YouTube is pushing further into traditional TV-style advertising, signaling a shift that could reshape the viewing experience — and attract bigger brand budgets. What’s happening. Some TV viewers are being shown ads up to 90 seconds long before they can skip, a significant jump from the 30-second unskippable formats introduced recently. How it works. The longer ad blocks appear primarily on TV devices and may exceed 90 seconds in total length, with the skip option only becoming available after that initial window. Why we care. YouTube is creating more premium, TV-like ad inventory that allows for longer, more impactful storytelling on the big screen. This open…

At $50+ CPCs, Reddit beats every vendor organically 67.3% of the time across 8,566 keywords. The study from Ross Simmonds and his team focused on B2B SaaS, but the underlying dynamics don’t stop there. The higher the advertising competition on a term, the more likely a Reddit thread sits above every brand in organic results. If you’re in legal, financial services, premium home services, or insurance, those CPCs aren’t unusual territory. This study is worth your attention. The SEO community has been talking about this for a while, and the conversation has largely stayed in SEO territory: Reddit is eating organic search, so build your glossaries and invest in …

Google posted a new help document on “Things to know about Google’s web crawling.” While many of those “things to know” are already known, Google felt it would be a good idea to make this document in order to provide “basic educational information about crawling to better highlight various resources about crawling that are available to site owners.” The document has 9 items posted in it right now including: Frequent crawling is a good sign! Google wrote, “If we’re crawling your site a lot, it’s an indication your pages have fresh or highly relevant content that people want to find, and that our systems are recognizing that demand. Online shopping is a great …

Version 4.6 of Yoast Duplicate Post is here, and it’s all about making your editing experience feel more natural in WordPress’s Block Editor, and making sure “Rewrite & Republish” works reliably every time you need it. A more modern editing experience Everything where you’d expect it. The Duplicate Post controls now sit in the Block Editor’s sidebar, right alongside WordPress’s own settings, no more hunting around. If you’re still on the Classic Editor, nothing changes for you. Buttons that look the part. The “Copy to a new draft” and “Rewrite & Republish” actions are now proper bordered buttons, consistent with the rest of the WordPress interface. Cle…

Walmart said conversion rates for purchases made directly inside ChatGPT were three times lower than when users clicked through to its website. Why we care. This suggests agentic commerce isn’t ready to replace traditional shopping. Sending users to owned environments still drives higher conversion rates. The details. Starting in November, Walmart offered about 200,000 products through OpenAI’s Instant Checkout. Users could complete purchases inside ChatGPT without visiting Walmart’s site. Daniel Danker, Walmart’s EVP of product and design, said those in-chat purchases converted at one-third the rate of click-out transactions. He called the experience “uns…

AI won’t make SEO obsolete, but it’ll change how the work gets done. There’s a growing concern that as AI systems improve, they’ll replace the need for human SEO analysis entirely. Early experiments suggest otherwise. While AI can assist with technical tasks and even generate usable outputs, it still depends heavily on detailed human input, structured data, and technical oversight to produce meaningful results. The real shift is toward redistribution. AI is accelerating parts of the workflow, raising the bar for execution, and changing where human expertise matters most. Why AI hasn’t made SEO obsolete AI aims to reduce the need for semi-technical expertis…

With AI, you can generate dozens (if not hundreds) of articles in hours and publish at scale. But publishing is the easy part. What happens after they go live is what matters. Together with the research team at SE Ranking, we ran a 16-month experiment to track how well AI-generated content performed on brand-new domains with zero authority. As you will see, the results are hard to call a success. Here’s the full story behind our experiment. Methodology The goal was simple: test how far AI content — with no human editing, rewriting, or enhancement — could go in search. How quickly would it get indexed? Could it rank for relevant queries? Most imp…