SEO Tools and Resources

In February 2025, the world watched as a small group of humanoid robots took the stage at the CCTV Chinese New Year show for the very first time. It was a charming performance, even if the steps were shaky and the movements were mostly limited to the arms. Just one year later, at the Spring Festival Gala, the shaky steps were gone and the humanoid robots were able to actually run and do standing somersaults and full kung fu routines with swords and nunchaku. The message was clear: in just one year, we have witnessed a decade’s worth of advancement. The 10-year leap in technology is real and not limited to robotics. Which raises a critical question for every digita…

Google will no longer support FAQ rich results as of May 7, 2026. This means you will no longer see FAQ rich results in the Google Search results going forward. Plus, Google Search Console will stop reporting on FAQ structured data. What Google said. Google posted a note at the top of the FAQ structured data developer documentation saying: FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Google Search. We will be dropping the FAQ search appearance, rich result report, and support in the Rich results test in June 2026. To allow time for adjusting your API calls, support for the FAQ rich result in the Search Console API will be removed in August 2026. Remove code…

OpenAI is making a clearer push into e-commerce advertising by letting retailers generate ads directly from their product catalogues inside ChatGPT. What’s happening. Retailers can now connect product feeds to ChatGPT, allowing the platform to automatically create ads using product names, images and attributes, instead of building campaigns manually. The ads themselves don’t change for users. They still appear beneath responses and are clearly labelled as sponsored. Why we care. Running ads at scale has been a major barrier for e-commerce brands in ChatGPT. This update removes that friction, especially for retailers with large inventories, by turning produ…

Create helpful, high-quality content, and you’ll rank. That’s been the prevailing wisdom in search for over a decade. But “create great content” was always an incomplete recommendation. It treated one input in a multi-layer ranking system as the entire strategy. Content can be well researched, technically accurate, and aligned with search intent, and still struggle to rank. The issue is usually positioning. When good content fails to rank, there’s often a barrier underneath it — technical limitations, authority gaps, weak entity recognition, or misaligned competition. Until you identify which barrier is holding your content back, rewriting is usually wast…

If you’re reading this, you’re likely an SEO aficionado like me. I’m a seasoned SEO with 10+ years of agency experience. Being on the agency side gave me deep SEO expertise, exposure to top industry talent, and experience working with some of the world’s most well-known brands. I did a bit of everything on the agency side — from technical SEO to content marketing to new business. Working at an agency is nothing like working in-house. After a long run on the agency side, I moved in-house for the first time. Here are seven things I’ve learned since making the switch. 1. Owning performance changes how SEO is evaluated On the agency side, when performance d…

One of the major reasons PPC practitioners hold onto syntax-oriented keyword strategies is the disconnect between “query intent” and “conversion intent.” For years, you’ve likely relied on keywords to show you understand what your customers want and to prequalify traffic using syntax-oriented signals. As user behavior shifts to more conversational queries and AI becomes an increasingly relevant part of the user journey, the distinction between these two intents becomes even more critical to understand and act on. Here, we’ll define query and conversion intent and explore strategies to apply them effectively. This isn’t prescriptive. You should make decisions based…

Google is set to automatically link Google Ads accounts with associated YouTube channels — according to communications sent to multiple advertisers — tightening the connection between video engagement and ad performance. What’s happening. Advertisers have received notices that, from June 10, 2026, Google Ads accounts that aren’t already linked to a YouTube channel will be automatically connected. The update removes the need for manual linking and ensures advertisers can access video engagement data and targeting features by default. Why we care. Linking a YouTube channel unlocks deeper insights and more advanced targeting options — something many advertise…

If you’ve ever opened a new post and immediately closed it again because you had no idea what to write, this one’s for you. Yoast AI Content Planner is now available for Yoast SEO Premium users. Open a new post in your WordPress editor and you’ll find five relevant post ideas waiting for you, built from your existing site content. Pick one and Yoast builds out a structured draft, ready to write into. What does it do? Yoast AI Content Planner scans your existing site content, spots the gaps that matter, and gives you five relevant post ideas, right inside the WordPress editor. Pick the one that feels right and Yoast turns it into a structured starter draft, c…

When a website migration goes wrong, the consequences can be a devastating loss of organic traffic and revenue. But what happens when the damage isn’t immediately visible? What if Google is silently deprioritizing your content, page by page, until your traffic has evaporated? This is the case study of how a multinational media organization lost 90% of its traffic following a domain migration, and how addressing a seemingly harmless technical issue — soft 404 errors — helped unlock suppressed traffic potential across 13 country-specific domains. While this case study examines events from 2021–2023, the lessons learned remain timeless and directly applicable to any …

The AI engine pipeline runs 10 gates from discovered through won. Discovered is the bot finding your page. Alongside selected, crawled, rendered, and indexed, those five infrastructure gates get you legible to the machine. Annotated, recruited, grounded, and displayed are the four competitive gates where the algorithm decides whether your brand is the brand it’s prepared to put in front of a buyer. Won is the gate that pays for everything: the click happens, the recommendation lands, and the agent transacts. Won has changed beyond recognition in the last 24 months. It used to mean a click on a search result, the human doing the picking, the brand competin…

Google Discover has publisher profile pages. They live at profile.google.com/cp/ and appear when someone taps a publisher’s name on a Discover card. These pages aren’t new. They launched in August 2025 with the Follow button rollout, and by November 2025 Google’s documentation referred to them as “source overviews.” For most of the 47,000+ publishers we monitored, the pages are auto-generated: a name, follower count, social links pulled from the Knowledge Graph, recent posts, and a footer label that reads “Profile generated by Google.” Since March 2026, though, something changed for a small subset of publishers. A group gained access to enhanced profiles: custom b…

Google is bringing Gemini into Google Ads dashboards, aiming to make data analysis more interactive, visual and accessible. What’s happening. Google Ads is rolling out a new Dashboards feature that lets advertisers explore performance data using charts, graphs and tables, powered by Gemini. Users can customise views simply by typing prompts, with the dashboard updating in real time based on their queries. Why we care. Data analysis in Google Ads has traditionally required manual setup and navigation across reports. This update shifts that workflow toward a more conversational model, where advertisers ask questions and get instant visual answers. Zo…

We’ve been flooded with generative engine optimization (GEO) advice over the last couple of years – from checklists for AI citations to signal frameworks and technical guides explaining how to structure content for large language models. Most GEO advice converges around the same idea: If you want to be visible in AI-generated answers, you need to be structured, authoritative, and easy to extract. In my opinion, even though this information is extremely valuable and valid, it’s still incomplete if your brand is already positioning itself for a future where AI-generated answers dominate search. What this entire layer of advice assumes is that your brand is alr…

Think about the last time you binged those true crime documentaries. The next time you opened your streaming app, the homepage likely shifted. Investigative series rose to the top. Maybe a notification alerted you when a new series dropped. Promotional emails highlighted only what you hadn’t watched. You didn’t see the data parsing or the decisioning behind it. You just looked forward to enjoying the next title. That’s the standard. According to the Adobe 2025 AI and digital trends report , 71% of consumers want personalized — or personally relevant — offers and information, and 78% expect seamless experiences across channels. Yet fewer than half of brands consistentl…

Editor’s note: This research was conducted by Exploding Topics, the trend discovery platform owned by Semrush, and is republished here with permission. Data is drawn from a proprietary survey of 1,009 US consumers. Full methodology appears at the end of this article. More than three in four consumers have used AI to help with shopping or purchasing decisions in the last six months, according to new research from Exploding Topics. AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini have been absorbed into weekly shopping routines. The technology has rapidly become a staple of product research and price comparison, for everything from clothing to groceries. But at the same…

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…

I’ve built 10+ SEO agent skills in 34 days. Six worked on the first try. The other four taught me everything I’m about to show you about the folder structure most LinkedIn posts about AI SEO skills gloss over. What makes these agents reliable isn’t better prompts. It’s the architecture behind them. Here’s how to build an agent from scratch, test it, fix it, and ship it with confidence. Why most AI SEO skills fail Here’s what a typical “AI SEO prompt” looks like on LinkedIn: You are an SEO expert. Analyze the following website and provide a comprehensive audit with recommendations. That’s it. One prompt. Maybe some formatting instructions. The person post…

Google is trying a new method of bot authentication named Web Bot Auth. Google posted a new help document that explains that Web Bot Auth is a “new cryptographic protocol that helps websites to validate that bots are authentic.” The goal of Web Bot Auth is to help you automate the process of authenticating which AI Agent bots are authentic and which are fraud. Limited test. Google said the search compan is “testing the protocol with some AI agents hosted on Google infrastructure.” Not all Google user agents are using Web Bot Auth and Google is not yet signing every request of agents using the protocol. Thus Google recommends that in addition to Web Bot Auth yo…

The AI engine pipeline has 10 gates between your content and a recommendation: Discovered. Selected. Crawled. Rendered. Indexed. Annotated. Recruited. Grounded. Displayed. Won. Confidence at each gate multiplies, which means your worst gate sets your ceiling, and a single near-zero anywhere in the chain drags the whole result down with it. That dynamic leads to a simple rule. The “Straight C” principle: in any multiplicative system, the weakest stage sets the ceiling for the entire system, and the highest-leverage fix is always the near-zero, not the near-perfect. Brent D. Payne nailed it in Sydney in 2019: “better to …

Initial reports from SimilarWeb indicate ChatGPT ads are outperforming traditional benchmarks on engagement — but with limited inventory and small-scale tests, it’s too early to call this a long-term trend. What’s happening. According to early analysis, ads appearing in ChatGPT conversations are generating strong click-through rates vs Display and Podcast channels, likely driven by high-intent user queries and the native way ads are integrated into responses. Unlike traditional search ads, these placements appear directly within conversational answers, making them feel more contextual and less disruptive. Why we care . If these early CTRs hold at scale, Ch…

SEO has always been a fight for the first page of Google. Every toolchain, audit, and content brief assumes that Google’s ranking systems evaluate a relatively fixed set of roughly 20 to 30 candidate pages before final rankings are determined. Google has kept that set small because evaluating more pages is computationally expensive. Google’s VP of Search acknowledged the constraint in federal court. The company’s CEO later confirmed the hardware bottleneck behind it. Google’s research division has now published a technique designed to reduce those costs. If the candidate set widens, the rules of the last decade stop working. Why the ranking window is 20 to…

Google is expanding Merchant Center for Agencies worldwide, giving agencies a centralized way to manage product data, diagnose issues and spot growth opportunities across multiple clients. What’s happening. After launching in the U.S. and Canada, Merchant Center for Agencies is now rolling out globally to all agency users. The tool is designed to help agencies manage merchant accounts at scale as product data becomes more critical to performance across shopping and discovery experiences. Why we care. Managing product feeds across multiple clients has long been fragmented and time-consuming. This update brings those workflows into one place — helping agenci…

Adthena is bringing competitive visibility to ChatGPT ads — launching a new platform designed to track how brands show up across prompts, placements and competitors. What’s happening. Adthena has unveiled its ChatGPT Intelligence Platform, positioning it as the first tool to offer whole-market visibility into ChatGPT Ads — similar to what it already provides for Google Ads. The platform monitors more than 300,000 daily prompts, tracking which brands are advertising, where ads appear, and what messaging they use. Why we care. ChatGPT’s native ads tools currently show advertisers a limited, self-focused view of performance. Adthena is stepping in to fill tha…

Wikipedia was once widely considered an unreliable source. Today, however, it’s often treated as a credible reference point because of its extensive citations and collaborative editing process. It’s also one of the primary sources AI search systems rely on. Alongside Reddit, Wikipedia heavily influences the information surfaced by ChatGPT and Google. The downside to this is that Wikipedia isn’t always foolproof. Negative or outdated information often persists on certain pages for months or even years. That information is then funneled back into AI search systems and relayed to users. This creates a feedback loop where outdated or negative narratives can gain l…

Link building has to evolve. For years, SEOs measured visibility through keywords, rankings, links, and click-through traffic. Those things still matter. But the return signal has weakened, especially at the top of the funnel. The bigger shift is how your prospective customers solve problems. Buyers* no longer have to compress a question, constraint, fear, or doubt into a keyword. They can ask AI systems in natural language, add context, and explain what they need in order to make the best decision for their situation. If teams sleep on that shift, they’re going to wake up with visibility nightmares they can’t explain with old SEO metrics. That ch…