SEO Tools and Resources

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…

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…

Google has published a new guide on how to optimize for Google’s generative AI features, like AI Mode, AI Overviews and more. A lot of this content is put together from previous communication from Google but all in a neat new help document named Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. What’s in the document. The document covers the following topics: SEO is relevant for generative AI search, follow Google’s best practices for SEO. Create valuable, non-commodity content for your audience Provide a unique point of view Create non-commodity content that’s helpful, reliable and people-first Organize content in a way that helps yo…

AI regulations are still in their infancy. Europe has taken the lead with the EU Artificial Intelligence Act. In the United States, nearly 20 states have enacted AI legislation. At the same time, federal policymakers have signaled interest in limiting state-level regulation to keep the overall regulatory environment relatively light, as shown by the recent AI policy wishlist published by the White House. Regardless of how quickly new regulations emerge, one thing is clear: AI isn’t reinventing the legal landscape; it’s accelerating it. Most AI risks trace back to familiar areas like intellectual property, privacy, contracts, consumer protection, discrimination, and li…

Every few weeks, someone publishes a piece about AI agents taking over Google Ads, SEO, or social media. Inevitably, the agents look impressive — in theory, at least. But then you dig deeper to determine what data the agent is working with. Almost always, the answer is the same. These agents typically work with data that’s native to the platform. For Google Ads, that means impressions, clicks, conversions, and return on ad spend (ROAS). This oversimplified approach is the reason AI agents in PPC often fail at the input layer, before they’ve made a single decision. An agent that has access to platform-native data only can’t truly manage your marketing. Why many…

Google has confirmed a bug with the Discover report within Google Search Console. Google had a data “logging” error that caused a decrease in clicks and impressions for the Discover report between the dates of May 7, 2026 until May 8, 2026. Google said this is just a “data logging only” and your positioning in Google Discover was not impacted. The issue. Google again said a data logging issue caused reporting issues with the Discover report between May 7, 2026, and May 8, 2026. This may have resulted in a “decrease in clicks and impressions in the Discover performance report,” Google posted. Why we care. There were a number of publishers noticing a drop in…

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…

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…

“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…

AI-powered experiences like Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Ask Maps are changing how customers discover local businesses. People are asking more detailed, conversational questions, and AI-powered systems can now influence which businesses get surfaced. Traditional rankings are only part of the visibility equation. Complete, accurate business information — including your Google Business Profile, reviews, photos, and local content — can help customers and AI systems better understand your brand. Join SOCi and Google for an exclusive webinar, Winning the Next Era of Local Visibility, on June 3. You will learn: How AI is transforming local search. Which …

Are you planning your PPC channel budgets by comparing Google Ads, Meta Ads, GA4, and your CRM/CMS data? Since those data don’t align, what do you report on? And how do you make sure you’re optimizing for real impact? If you think you need better tracking, cleaner UTMs, and maybe a more sophisticated analytics setup, you’re not alone. But more often than not, the issue is something else entirely. Let’s call it the attribution trap. The main problem is that an entire generation of marketers has been taught to be data-driven. If configured correctly, analytics tools are supposed to tell you what’s working. Just follow the data. But attribution can quickly become…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

Watch this video on YouTube In a recent PPC Live podcast conversation, Dean Kadi, Head of Paid Growth at One Link Media, shared a real-world agency experience where a client insisted on replacing high-performing Meta ads with heavily branded creative — despite clear evidence that the existing strategy was delivering strong results. The discussion highlights the tension agencies often face between expertise and client preference, while offering valuable lessons on communication, testing, tracking, and why data should always lead decision-making in PPC. The campaign was performing exceptionally well Dean Kadi and his team at One Link Media built a highly success…

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…

Google is phasing out offline conversion imports through the Google Ads API for some developers starting June 15th. Advertisers and martech providers that rely on offline conversion imports, including enhanced conversions for leads, will need to migrate workflows to the Data Manager API to avoid disruptions. Details. Google notified developers that offline conversion imports using the UploadClickConversions request will stop working after June 15, for accounts that have not used the functionality in the last 180 days. The change applies to offline conversion imports and enhanced conversions for leads. Other Google Ads API operations will continue functioning n…

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 …

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…