SEO Tools and Resources

We spent six months testing custom visual assets across 47 articles on a client’s high-traffic accounting education website to find out which design investments actually improved SEO performance. The experiment included featured images, infographics, and video across both new and existing content. Some visual assets consistently increased organic traffic. Others turned out to be a poor use of time and budget despite requiring far more production effort. The goal wasn’t to prove that any image helps. Basic visuals are already table stakes. Instead, the focus was on the ROI of bespoke design and which visual assets consistently improved organic traffic. The clea…

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…

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…

You prompt ChatGPT with something, and suddenly your brand name shows up in the response. Sounds like a win, right? But before you share the screenshot with your team, there’s one important question to ask: Is your brand being cited or mentioned? As AI search and LLM-driven discovery continue to grow, understanding the difference between AI brand mentions and AI citations is becoming increasingly important for SEO and brand visibility. In this article, we’ll break down what AI brand mentions are, how they work, and how they differ from citations. Since we know you’re excited to celebrate your AI visibility win, let’s get straight into it. Table of contents W…

Most businesses sound interchangeable online, and AI search is making that impossible to ignore. When ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, or other AI systems summarize your business, they build that understanding from your website, profiles, reviews, and content. If all of it sounds like everyone else in your category, the machine’s summary will too. This is why AI visibility is becoming a positioning problem as much as a technical one. Businesses that stand out in AI search are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most aggressive tactics. They’re the businesses that clearly communicate who they serve, what they do differently, and why customers sho…

Google is introducing Ask Advisor, a new Gemini-powered AI collaborator designed to work across Google Ads, Google Analytics, Merchant Center and Google Marketing Platform as announced today at Google Marketing Live 2026. Driving the news. Ask Advisor acts as a unified agent that connects insights, workflows and recommendations across Google’s marketing ecosystem. According to Google, the tool can help marketers launch campaigns, analyze performance and surface optimization recommendations without needing to switch between products. For example, a marketer could ask Ask Advisor to “find new customers for my hair care products,” and the system would automatical…

Microsoft is rolling out a slate of new advertising updates aimed at simplifying campaign management and improving AI-powered optimization across its ad platform. What’s new. Microsoft introduced a new Import Center designed to simplify importing campaigns from Google Ads and Meta Ads into Microsoft Advertising. The new hub allows advertisers to: Search and filter imports Edit or pause imports Access imported campaigns View troubleshooting guidance Get performance recommendations after imports complete Microsoft says the goal is to reduce manual troubleshooting and simplify cross-platform campaign management. Bidding capabilities. AI-power…

For most of modern marketing history, the operating assumption was surprisingly theatrical. Brands performed. Consumers watched. Channels existed primarily to distribute persuasion more efficiently than the next company. Even performance marketing, for all its mathematical confidence, still revolved around a fundamentally human premise: somewhere on the other side of the screen sat a person making a series of reasonably linear decisions. That model is beginning to fracture. Not because consumers disappeared. Because software started participating in the decision-making process and now marketers need to take notice. Recommendation systems already shape disc…

What differentiates a great SEO professional from a good one is often their ability to manage stakeholders effectively. This is especially true in technical SEO, where projects often depend on multiple teams, and it can be difficult to communicate the need for implementation. Stakeholder management typically comes down to one thing: the perceived value of the work. With technical SEO, that can be hard to establish. Non-SEOs are unlikely to inherently understand the value of improving a website’s internal linking architecture or implementing schema markup. The most effective technical SEO initiatives aren’t framed only as SEO improvements. They’re directly tied to …

Watch this video on YouTube Frederick Vallaeys’ route into PPC started with a student side hustle, not a career plan. While at Stanford in 1998, he spotted a resale opportunity in used Blockbuster video cassettes and needed a way to find buyers. That led him to GoTo, an early search engine where advertisers could bid on keywords – and gave him his first glimpse of the power of paid search. More than 20 years later, Vallaeys has become one of the best-known voices in PPC, a former Googler, one of the early builders in the Google Ads ecosystem, and founder of Optmyzr. In this interview, he looks back at the early days of Google Ads, how automation changed e…

AI search measurement in 2026 looks a lot like paid media in 2008. Everyone can see the impressions. Almost nobody can defend the revenue. Agencies are slapping AI visibility dashboards onto retainers, clients are writing checks, and CFOs are starting to ask the question that always ends a hype cycle: Prove it. Here’s the hard truth. Citation share, presence rate, and AI Overview appearance counts are the new domain authority. They look defensible in a slide. For 95% of the agencies selling them, they aren’t connected to pipelines in any rigorous way. What I lay out below is a five-layer framework for measuring GEO performance that you can actually defend. No…

Advertisers are paying more for clicks in Google Ads — but they’re also getting better at turning those clicks into conversions, according to new benchmark data from WordStream by LocaliQ. The 2025 benchmark report, based on more than 16,000 campaigns, found the average Google Ads cost-per-click (CPC) rose to $5.42, up from $4.66 the previous year. CPCs increased in 87% of industries analyzed. At the same time, average conversion rates climbed to 8.18%, suggesting advertisers are getting more efficient even as traffic becomes more expensive. Why advertisers should care. The latest benchmarks reinforce a growing reality in paid search: cheap traffic is dis…

By now, you’ve heard the doom and gloom. In April, Verizon CEO Dan Schulman warned that AI could push U.S. unemployment to 20%-30% over the next two to five years. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. Ford CEO Jim Farley has said AI could replace “literally half” of white-collar workers in the U.S. SEO is a white-collar job. So does that mean our jobs will be eliminated, too? The answer isn’t as obvious as you might think. Yes, the world is changing. But if you’ve been doing SEO for a while, you should be used to that by now. SEOs have always been forced to wear str…

Google introduced publisher follows and profile pages to Discover last year but the feature remains lightly documented and poorly understood. Since then, publisher profiles have started appearing more broadly across Discover for publishers, creators, and social-first accounts. Here’s how Discover publisher profiles appear to function today, how they connect to social accounts and the Knowledge Graph, and why some publishers are already getting access to more customizable profile experiences. Why publisher profiles matter more now As a technical SEO, I’m used to Google leaving plenty unsaid in its documentation. Discover publisher profiles take that even fur…

Understanding how to optimize for visibility in Google Ask Maps starts with recognizing what’s changing. Instead of returning a long list of businesses, Ask Maps narrows the field, interprets the user’s intent, and explains why certain businesses are a good fit. That shift has an important implication. Visibility in Ask Maps now depends on how a business is understood and positioned within the response. If Ask Maps is more recommendation-driven, what should businesses and SEOs do differently? At a high level, the answer is not to treat Ask Maps as a separate tactic. It’s to make your business easier for Google to understand, easier to match to real-world situation…

Google Marketing Live 2026 made one thing clear: Gemini is no longer just powering features — it’s becoming the operating system behind Google’s advertising, commerce and measurement ecosystem. This year’s event focused heavily on agentic AI, conversational Search, automated creative production and AI-assisted shopping experiences. Across Search, YouTube, Merchant Center and Analytics, Google introduced new tools designed to make campaigns more autonomous, predictive and interconnected. Here’s a recap of the biggest announcements from Google Marketing Live 2026. Google introduces a new generation of AI-powered Search ads Google announced several new Gemini-…

Google’s new Lighthouse “Agentic Browsing” audits now check for the presence of an llms.txt file. The new experimental Lighthouse documentation frames llms.txt as a discoverability and efficiency signal for AI agents, not a traditional crawling directive. The audits are part of Chrome’s emerging “Agentic Browsing” category, which evaluates whether sites are structured for machine interaction. This document comes less than a week after Google published new guidance on optimizing for AI search features like AI Overviews and AI Mode, in which it said you don’t need llms.txt files in a mythbusting section of its new guide on optimizing for generative AI features. …

Anyone who’s been following me on LinkedIn or X has seen my smartass responses to people making some of the dumbest claims imaginable. “100% automate your SEO.” “Fully automate your content calendar.” “Run your business with AI while you sleep.” At this point, I’m just waiting for AI to start doing my dishes. (Please be true.) But jokes aside, there’s something deeper going on here that’s worth talking about. View embedded content LLM: Looting, lying, manipulating I was talking with a good buddy, Rob Wormley, a great GTM consultant, about the state of AI. Like most conversations right now, it started with a discussion of the cool things w…

Running SEO and GEO/AEO audits is an excellent use case for AI, especially with recent models that have agentic capabilities. These models have extensive knowledge bases and can perform multistep processes, such as extracting webpages, reviewing data, and formulating recommendations. But before running your SEO or GEO/AEO audit in Claude or ChatGPT, have you considered whether the model has everything it needs to provide a good response? You might be shocked to discover that state-of-the-art models provide detailed recommendations without the most basic information, including Google SERPs, keyword volumes, or even the ability to fetch URL content. For example: …

Large language models (LLMs) excel at synthesizing enormous amounts of information into personalized responses to plain-language prompts. These responses draw on massive training datasets and are often enhanced with internet searches. The fastest way to influence what LLMs say about your brand is to influence the content they retrieve through those searches. At Evertune Research, we use the Evertune AI marketing platform to track hundreds of brands across 250 categories across every major LLM. This gives us clear insight into which content AI models cite most often, especially when users ask for brand or product recommendations across industries. For this analysis…

Google also announced some new agentic commerce features today in Google Search including Universal Cart, expanding Universal Commerce Protocol and Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). Plus, Google’s Shopping Graph now contains 60 billion product listings, which is up from 50 billion from earlier this year, announced Vidhya Srinivasan, VP/GM Ads & Commerce. Universal Cart. Google announced what it is calling the Universal Cart, where you can put products and items from multiple retailers into one single Google Universal Cart and check out on all those items with your Google Wallet with the click of a button. As you are on Google Search, you can add items directl…

Google is introducing new Merchant Center tools designed to help retailers improve visibility across AI-powered shopping experiences as announced today at Google Marketing Live 2026. Driving the news. The company announced AI Performance Insights, a new reporting feature that helps merchants understand how their brand performs across AI surfaces. The tool compares a brand’s share of voice against similar competitors and provides visibility into AI-driven discovery performance. Google is also rolling out Conversational Attributes, a new product data capability that helps retailers optimize listings for more natural, conversational search behavior. How it wo…

Google is expanding its Direct Offers pilot with new AI-powered promotion formats, native checkout integrations and travel-focused deal experiences as announced today at Google Marketing Live 2026. Driving the news. The company announced several updates designed to make promotional offers more discoverable inside AI-powered Search experiences. Brands will soon be able to upload: Discounts Giveaways Local coupons Product bundles Google says Gemini will help dynamically construct personalized offers based on search intent. How it works. Advertisers upload eligible promotions, products and campaign guardrails into Google Ads. Gemini then assembl…

Google is expanding its measurement capabilities with new integrations between Google Analytics 360, Meridian and predictive AI reporting tools as announced today at Google Marketing Live 2026. Driving the news. Meridian, Google’s open-source marketing mix modeling platform, will be integrated directly into Google Analytics 360. The integration is designed to help advertisers: Unify first-party and cross-channel data Measure incremental performance Forecast campaign outcomes Optimize media mix investments Google is also introducing Qualified Future Conversions (QFCs), a predictive reporting metric powered by Gemini. QFCs connect current a…