SEO Tools and Resources

AI search is changing how visibility works. Users are getting direct answers instead of clicking links, which means fewer chances to drive traffic. In this shift, AI citations are becoming the new gatekeepers, deciding which sources get featured in answers. Over the past year, search has moved from ranking pages to selecting sources, pushing us from traditional SEO toward AI-driven visibility. In this article, we’ll explain what AI citations are, how they work, and how you can earn them. Table of contents What are AI citations? How AI citations impact brand credibility How AI citations work: a complete breakdown Strategies to get cited by AI models Tracking AI b…

AI search citations favor a small set of formats. Listicles, articles, and product pages drive over half of all mentions across major LLMs, according to new Wix Studio AI Search Lab research analyzing 75,000 AI answers and more than 1 million citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. The findings. Listicles led at 21.9% of citations, followed by articles (16.7%) and product pages (13.7%). Together, these three formats made up 52% of all AI citations. Articles dominated informational queries, cited 2.7x more than other formats. Listicles captured 40% of commercial-intent citations, nearly double any other type. Why intent wins. Query intent…

The rules of search have changed. Marketing funnels aren’t meant to stall. You pour hours into creating content, refining workflows, optimizing landing pages, and protecting brand consistency. How can all that effort, content, and creativity go to waste? But your funnel feels it. The uncomfortable truth is that even the strongest funnel can’t save you if a large portion of your audience never sees your work. SEO is flatlining. AI-generated summaries are pushing your branded content aside. The metrics start to tell a story you don’t want to hear, one that makes it look like you don’t even have a marketing team. Even if you keep pace with endless de…

In 2026, AI is no longer something marketers are debating. It’s actively shaping nearly every part of digital advertising and creative. Because the human brain processes visuals far faster than text, video ads are becoming more important and more effective, especially as creative costs continue to fall. The question is no longer whether PPC teams should use AI for video advertising. It’s how to use it to drive better results, produce stronger creative, and avoid issues like hallucinations and governance gaps that can undermine performance. Why AI adoption alone no longer drives PPC performance Nearly 90% of advertisers now use generative AI to build o…

The numbers tell a story that most agency owners already know in their gut: AI anxiety is rising fast. In 2024, 44% of digital marketing agencies viewed AI as a significant threat to their business model. Just one year later, that number jumped to 53%, according to SparkToro’s annual State of Digital Agencies survey of hundreds of agency owners worldwide. But here’s what makes this particularly painful: agencies aren’t just watching AI disrupt their industry from the sidelines. They’re actively using it themselves, automating tasks, reducing costs, and hoping to improve margins. All while their clients are doing the exact same thing, using AI to justify slashing …

For years, marketers measured digital success through impressions, backlinks and clicks. If you ranked high in search results and won the click, you had visibility and control of the funnel. But that landscape is already shifting. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are rapidly becoming the first place decision-makers go for answers. These systems don’t return a page of links; they generate a synthesized response. Whether your brand is included, or ignored, in that answer increasingly determines your relevance in the buying journey. This changes the marketer’s playbook. Visibility is no longer only about ranking on Google. It’s…

For years, marketers measured digital success through impressions, backlinks and clicks. If you ranked high in search results and won the click, you had visibility and control of the funnel. But that landscape is already shifting. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are rapidly becoming the first place decision-makers go for answers. These systems don’t return a page of links; they generate a synthesized response. Whether your brand is included, or ignored, in that answer increasingly determines your relevance in the buying journey. This changes the marketer’s playbook. Visibility is no longer only about ranking on Google. It’s…

Most brands performing well in traditional local search fail to appear in results from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, according to SOCi’s newly released 2026 local visibility index. Also of note: business profile information was only about 68% accurate on ChatGPT and Perplexity, compared with 100% accuracy on Gemini, which is grounded in Google Maps. AI limits local visibility. Performance data from nearly 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands was analyzed to measure how often locations are surfaced or recommended by AI assistants. Turns out, AI platforms are far more selective than Google’s local results: 1.2% of locations were recommended…

Google has been layering AI into Search campaigns for years through features like Smart Bidding, Responsive Search Ads, and Performance Max. In May 2025, it announced the next step: AI Max. The feature is now rolling out globally in beta and appearing in many advertiser accounts. (If you don’t see it yet, expect it soon.) Here’s what it is, how it works, and what it means for your campaigns. What is AI Max for Search? AI Max is a feature within your existing Search campaign that you can toggle on or off. Enabling it provides targeting and creative enhancements in an automated way. According to Google, AI Max: Improves search term match…

Google’s AI Max for Search campaigns is changing how we run search ads. Launched in private beta as Search Max, the feature began rolling out globally in late May, with full availability expected by early Q3 2025. But will AI Max actually drive incremental growth or simply take credit for conversions your existing setup would have captured anyway? This article: Breaks down the key metrics to track in AI Max. Shares early results from travel, fashion, and B2B accounts. Includes a Google Ads script to make analysis faster and easier. Understanding AI Max Think of AI Max as Google combining the best parts of Dynamic Search Ads and Performance…

Google AI Max drives revenue but at a higher cost, according to Smarter Ecommerce’s Mike Ryan, who analyzed 250+ campaigns. Outcomes vary, and much more testing is still needed. Why we care. AI Max isn’t a minor update. It’s Google’s most significant reimagining of Search campaigns in years, shifting away from keyword syntax toward pure intent matching. For you, that’s both an opportunity (possible growth) and a risk (an efficiency tradeoff). By the numbers. The result of the analysis: Median revenue: +13% Median CPA: +16% ROAS range: +42% to -35% Advertisers who activate AI Max typically see 14% more conversions or conversion value at a similar…

A recent test run by the Adalysis team reveals that Google’s new AI Max setting is reshaping how search terms are matched and reported — creating blind spots for advertisers who rely on precise keyword control. When AI Max isn’t the right fit. AI Max isn’t inherently bad, but advertisers should think twice if: Broad match historically underperforms in your account. Your top exact/phrase match keywords are already constrained by budget. You prefer not to use text customization or Final URL expansion — both built-in components of AI Max. If you only need broad match, you can add those keywords manually and keep full control. How AI Max interacts with…

Advertisers are starting to push back on gaps in AI Max capabilities — particularly around landing page control — as Google continues its shift away from legacy Dynamic Search Ads (DSA). What’s happening. In a LinkedIn exchange, digital marketing expert Gabriele Benedetti raised concerns about AI Max lacking the same level of URL-based targeting controls that DSA campaigns offered. His point: DSA allowed advertisers to structure campaigns around website architecture — using categories, URL paths and page rules to guide where traffic lands. That level of control, he argued, is not yet fully replicated in AI Max. Why we care. For many advertisers — especially th…

Google has released a detailed Q&A for advertisers to clarify how its new AI Max tool works, addressing key questions around performance, control, and automation in search advertising. With the rollout of AI Max, a suite of ad tools powered by generative AI and search intelligence, the company is pitching it as the future of automated, performance-driven search advertising. What it does AI Max uses Google AI to: Match your ads with more relevant searches – even ones you aren’t bidding on. Customize ad copy dynamically based on user intent. Send users to your most relevant landing pages automatically. Questions asked by advertisers, answered b…

As conversational search gains traction, the bigger question isn’t who has more users, but who can monetize them. Google enters this phase with a massive advantage: mature ad systems, deep advertiser adoption, and decades of optimization. Early AI Mode signals point to a measured rollout. The panic phase is over After a period of panic within the company, Google’s built-in advantages, coupled with massive capital expenditures, have helped it regain ground on category leader ChatGPT in LLM search. In December 2025, Google’s own code red became OpenAI’s code red. The dust will continue to settle, and analysts have different takes. But one signal stands o…

Want AI search engines and agents to find and use your content? Traditional SEO isn’t enough. AI systems process information differently. This guide breaks down key optimizations to help your content stay visible and rank in the AI era. TL;DR: Quick AI optimization checklist To optimize for AI search and agents: Make content accessible with clean HTML/markdown and good structure. Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt and firewall rules. Return content fast, with key info high up. Use semantic markup, metadata, and schemas. Create an llms.txt file. Check your content’s AI visibility. Traditional SEO vs. AI search: The key difference…

Visibility in Google’s AI Overviews doesn’t equal traffic. In my research from the first half of this year, AI Overview citations consistently underperformed – even compared to traditional blue links near the bottom of the SERP. An AI Overview citation can still help with authority, brand recall, positioning, and maybe even long-term LLM training. But for short-term clicks? The data paints a sobering picture. How AI Overviews vs. blue links compare: What the data shows Are AI Overview citations actually gathering clicks? Or are they just pushing the real click-producers further down the page? That question led me to look at the performance of cla…

Pages that rank for Google’s AI Overview “fan-out” queries are much more likely to be cited than those that rank only for the main search query, according to data from Surfer SEO. An analysis of 10,000 keywords found a strong correlation (Spearman 0.77) between how many fan-out queries a page ranks for and its likelihood of being cited in Google’s AI Overviews. By the numbers. Pages ranking for fan-out queries are 161% more likely to be cited than pages ranking only for the main query. Also: 76% of the sampled keywords triggered AI Overviews. 33,000 fan-out queries were extracted using Gemini. Pages ranking for both the main query and at least one fan-…

Users are visiting Google more often but staying less. That’s one of several insights from a new analysis by Kevin Indig, in partnership with Similarweb, based on 5 billion search queries and 20 million websites across the U.S., UK, and Germany. The big picture. In the U.S., visits to Google are up +9% since AI Overviews launched in May 2024. Also: Time on site and pages per visit are flat or falling across markets. Query length has barely changed. The numbers point to a new user pattern: more frequent visits, shorter sessions – a shift toward “resolve and leave” behavior, according to Indig. By the numbers. Google visits are up in the U.S.: U.S. …

When ChatGPT, Claude, or Google’s AI get asked for brand or product recommendations, they almost never return the same list twice — and almost never in the same order. That’s the big finding from a new study from Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SparkToro, and Patrick O’Donnell, CTO and co-founder of Gumshoe.ai. They investigated whether generative AI recommendations are sufficiently consistent to be measured. What they tested. Six hundred volunteers ran 12 identical prompts through ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s AI nearly 3,000 times. Each response was normalized into an ordered list of brands or products. The team then compared those lists for overlap, or…

As artificial intelligence integrates deeper into our workflows, understanding its vulnerabilities is critical. A recently exposed vulnerability known as Best-of-N (BoN) jailbreaking has redefined how we view AI safety. Here’s a breakdown of BoN jailbreaking, how the attack works, and why it creates real risk for your data, brand, and the AI tools you rely on. First, a quick vocabulary check Before getting into BoN, there are two terms you need to actually understand, not just nod at. Brute force attack: Imagine trying to crack a four-digit PIN by starting at 0000, then 0001, then 0002, all the way to 9999. No cleverness, no strategy, just trying every si…

Historically, Google Search has driven innovation by rewarding high-quality content with visibility and traffic. In the last article in this series, we talked about the risks of Google AI over-personalizing results and reinforcing filter bubbles. In this article, we’ll look at the opposite risk. If Google’s new AI results skew away from diversity and towards standardized results that favor big brands and consensus views, it could limit creativity and innovation and accelerate the commodification of the web. Some may find this concern naive because the internet is already very commodified, but historically, even small websites and businesses believed that they had…

Everyone is talking about AI search as if it’s already universal — as if we’ve collectively moved on, users have shifted and discovery has changed for everyone. But the reality is far less straightforward. While AI search is growing fast, it isn’t being adopted evenly. The gap is increasingly shaped by something we don’t often discuss in search: household income. AI adoption isn’t equal — and the gap is widening My agency has been tracking how people search since early 2025. In our latest wave, we introduced a new lens: household income. What we found was a clear and significant divide. Overall, around 27% of people say they use ChatGPT regularly. But when …

Reddit ranks as the most-cited domain in AI-generated answers, followed by YouTube and LinkedIn, based on a new analysis of 30 million sources by Peec AI, an AI search analytics tool. The findings. Reddit was the most-cited source across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and Forbes also ranked in the top five. Review platforms like Yelp and G2 appeared often in recommendation queries. The research showed which domains models rely on: ChatGPT favored Wikipedia, Reddit, and editorial sites like Forbes. Google leaned toward platforms like Facebook and Yelp. Perplexity emphasized Reddit, LinkedIn,…

AI search engines and chatbots often provide wrong answers and make up article citations, according to a new study from Columbia Journalism Review. Why we care. AI search tools have ramped up the scraping of your content so they can serve answers to their users, often resulting in no clicks to your website. Also, click-through rates from AI search and chatbots are much lower than Google Search, according to a separate, unrelated study. But hallucinating citations makes an already bad situation even worse. By the numbers. More than half of the responses from Gemini and Grok 3 cited fabricated or broken URLs that led to error pages. Also, according to the study: …