SEO Tools and Resources

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…

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…

Marketing teams often operate with a hidden skepticism tax. Because they don’t fully trust their data, they spend enormous amounts of time cleaning spreadsheets, reconciling conflicting reports, and second-guessing both attribution models and AI outputs. The result is slower execution, weaker alignment across teams, and decisions built on uncertain foundations. Take branded search. It often gets credit for conversions that were likely to happen anyway, like a revolving door taking credit for everyone who enters a building. That gap between correlation and causation points to a much larger problem in modern marketing: too many teams operate on incomplete, fra…

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…

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…

The release of TurboQuant will completely change how we think about AI and SEO. This new algorithm from Google will greatly reduce computing power and energy by allowing for the massive compression of LLMs and vector search engines. Using six times less memory and running eight times faster, all without losing accuracy, the high cost of running AI will be dramatically reduced. As search moves away from a simple list of links on a SERP and turns into a system reliant on AI Overviews for immediate answers, the SEO industry needs to adapt and understand how to create true meaning and trust, and how they affect searching. Your customers search everywhere…

Condé Nast now plans its business “as if search is zero” after years of Google algorithm updates and AI Overviews reducing visits to publisher websites. That’s according to CEO Roger Lynch, who was interviewed on TBPN, the tech media network that bills itself as “technology’s daily show” and was acquired by OpenAI in April. What he’s saying. Condé Nast doesn’t expect Google traffic to disappear completely, but no longer considers search a reliable channel, Lynch said: “Last year, I told our teams: assume there’s no search. You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero.” “We don’t expect it to be zero… We expect it to be a single-digit percentag…

Google Search Query Reports are becoming less literal and more AI-interpreted, reflecting inferred intent rather than exact user searches. What’s happening. Google has clarified that the search terms shown in Search Query Reports may not exactly match what users typed. Instead, the platform may display the “closest approximation” of a query because of the complexity of modern search behavior. What’s behind it. The change reflects how heavily AI now influences Google Ads matching systems. Rather than relying solely on exact keywords, Google increasingly interprets user intent, context and behavior signals to determine which ads to show. Why we care. For adv…

Google is expanding its push into AI assistants for advertisers and retailers, embedding guidance tools directly into Merchant Center to simplify setup, troubleshooting and optimization. What’s happening. Google has been spotted testing Merchant Advisor, an AI-powered chatbot integrated into Google Merchant Center. The feature is currently in beta and appears designed to provide merchants with personalized recommendations and support inside the platform. How it works. Merchant Advisor proactively surfaces tasks and suggestions, such as setting up a returns policy or completing account configuration steps. The goal is to give merchants an always-on assistant that c…

Disclosure: I’m the co-founder of Optmyzr. I’ll use one of our open-source skills as the example below, but the frameworks here apply to anything you install or build. If you’ve used Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini for marketing work in the last six months, you’ve probably hit the same wall I have. The chat is great until you need the same thing done the same way every week. Then you’re back to copying a prompt template into a fresh window, hoping you didn’t forget a step, wondering why a tool this powerful still feels this manual. Skills are what bring that wall down. I’ve written before about skills as scalable systems for PPC and why agents are useless without a…

When OpenAI switched default models on March 4, the number of websites cited per response dropped by a fifth, and never recovered. But the citation drop is only part of the story. We also reverse-engineered ChatGPT’s internal browsing tools, ran a honeypot experiment, reconstructed its system prompt, and released a new version of our ChatGPT Search Capture plugin. What happened On March 4, ChatGPT switched its default model from GPT-4o/5.2 to GPT-5.3 Instant. The result: the average number of unique domains cited per response dropped from 19 to 15, a decline of more than 20%. Unique URLs per response followed the same trajectory, falling from 24 to 19. We…

LinkedIn has always been a key driver for B2B discovery, but over the past few years, a new layer of upper-funnel clout has developed: the platform’s influence on AI search citations. LLMs are increasingly influential in how B2B buyers discover products and services, and LinkedIn has become a top source of this information. This means that if your brand effectively optimizes its LinkedIn presence and content flow for AI search ingestion, you’ll likely get a corresponding bump in AEO-based discovery. In our work with B2B clients (mostly of the high-growth SaaS variety), we’ve divided this LinkedIn AEO initiative into three segments: Optimize earned media. F…

“Hi Frank, I had ChatGPT look at our SEO and it has a bunch of recommendations. Can you take care of this for us?” We’re all getting some version of this email from clients and bosses. Responding is fraught with challenges. How do you avoid sounding defensive or dismissive? How do you avoid looking territorial while still explaining that some of these recommendations are generic, flawed, or completely wrong? It’s one thing to know SEO. It’s another to know how to respond tactfully when AI-generated recommendations are suddenly part of the conversation. Resist the urge to respond, ‘ChatGPT is wrong’ It might feel good to tell them the AI output they sent…

You just ran a crawl of your website. The report flags hundreds of technical issues, many marked by your tool of choice as high priority. You map out a plan based on best practices, and you’re already dreading the email to your developers. But here’s the catch: Many of those “critical errors” don’t actually matter. You can spend weeks resolving “high-priority” technical issues and still see no meaningful impact on traffic or conversions. Some fixes look critical and do absolutely nothing. A 404 buried six levels deep in the site architecture? Probably not worth the fire drill it causes. Meanwhile, a seemingly minor internal linking issue on high-value categor…

Google Analytics added a new AI Assistant channel that tracks traffic from chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. The update should help you measure visits from AI assistants without using custom filters or workarounds. What’s new. Google Analytics now automatically labels traffic from supported AI assistants with new traffic source values. When someone clicks on your site from a supported AI chatbot, Google Analytics will automatically assign that visit to one of these new channels. Medium: ai-assistant Channel Group: “AI Assistant” Campaign: (ai-assistant) Why we care. This update should help you track AI traffic directly inside standard GA4 repor…

Google released version 24.1 of the Google Ads API, introducing deeper reporting segmentation, expanded experiment support, and new security features as advertisers continue adapting to increasingly automated campaign environments. The update also prepares developers for Google’s upcoming data retention policy changes, which take effect next year. Why we care. The release focuses on three areas that have become increasingly important for advertisers: visibility into performance, creative control, and testing automation. The update also gives brands more control over how creatives appear in Demand Gen campaigns, an area where automation has often limited custom…

Microsoft Advertising is bringing LinkedIn profile targeting to connected TV campaigns, giving advertisers a new way to blend professional audience data with streaming inventory. The announcement was made by Product Liaison Navah Hopkins during the SEM Stories event on May 14. Why we care. Microsoft has long differentiated itself through access to LinkedIn audience data. Bringing that targeting capability into connected TV extends those signals into a fast-growing upper funnel format that has historically lacked precise professional targeting. For B2B advertisers especially, the move could help bridge the gap between brand awareness and performance measurement…

Most marketing teams have no shortage of tools. In fact, the average B2B organization manages between 12 and 20 martech tools. And yet, maintaining brand consistency at scale is still a challenge; fewer than 10% of brands sustain strong brand cohesiveness across their complete product and channel portfolios. The problem with most martech stacks is that those tools rarely work together in service of a single goal: feels consistent across all platforms and touchpoints. If you’ve spent any time managing a brand across channels, whether it’s through campaigns, sales enablement, partner content, or social media, then you know how quickly brand elements can drift. A slightl…

Google updates its search spam policies to clarify that those policies also apply to Google’s generative AI responses within Google Search. Google is saying that if you use these spam techniques to show your site or brand within AI Overviews, AI Mode or other AI responses, that would be considered spam and Google can take action. What changed. Google updated the introductory line to say: “In the context of Google Search, spam refers to techniques used to deceive users or manipulate our Search systems into featuring content prominently, such as attempting to manipulate Search systems into ranking content highly or attempting to manipulate generative Al responses i…

Forecasting SEO performance means estimating future outcomes from historical data. But search behavior rarely follows stable or linear patterns. Seasonal demand, anomalies, SERP changes, and measurement issues can all distort your data and lead to unreliable forecasts. That makes forecasting more complex than running linear regression, exponential smoothing, or asking an LLM to project trends from historical performance. Here’s how to account for seasonality, detect anomalies, and build more reliable SEO forecasts in Python using models designed for non-linear search data. SEO forecasting pays the bills, but doesn’t add much value Decision-makers rely o…

Most law firms follow the same trajectory with SEO. They invest in content, build out service pages, refine their technical foundation, and align their site to targeted keywords. Early on, the results are there. But firms often don’t realize they’ve hit the ceiling on their SEO strategy. They just feel it. Rankings stall, growth slows, and the default response is almost always to do more: Publish more content, target more keywords, make more incremental optimizations. However, for firms already investing in SEO, the problem likely isn’t effort or execution. It’s that their strategy is missing the layer that actually drives sustained visibility. SEO still is…

New technologies come and go. Early in my career, I often chased shiny new things in an attempt to be on the cutting edge, but it didn’t take more than a few years to realize I was spending countless hours of my time, and my clients’ time, implementing technologies and techniques that went by the wayside. Google Authorship, anyone? It turns out that if you simply wait for wider — but still early — adoption, learn from the first movers’ mistakes, and catch up quickly, you can avoid wasting time and create greater value for yourself and those you serve. That lesson has served me well. And then there are those key moments where the early movers stand to not just win …

If you’ve searched for almost any product on Google recently, you’ve seen how much the results page has changed. Product packs and scrollable carousels of individual listings now appear multiple times on a single results page. We’re constantly evaluating data to understand how to scale ecommerce visibility. We’ve tracked searches that returned 60 individual organic product listings on a single page. These are premium placements — and for a growing share of commercial searches, they’re where the purchase journey begins. This shift is happening gradually enough that many brands haven’t fully recalibrated their strategy around it. The data suggests i…

Microsoft has rolled out the Citations dashboard within Microsoft Clarity, the analytics tool. Microsoft announced, “With this release, Citations in Microsoft Clarity moves into general availability with those refinements incorporated into the product.” This should give you access to see how well your pages are performing within AI-experiences. Citations dashboard. The Citation dashboard shows how your content is referenced in AI-generated answers across supported AI experiences by summarizing and aggregating citation activity across the following areas: Page citations: The total number of times pages from your domain were referenced in AI-generated answers d…