SEO Tools and Resources

Google is quietly testing a new “App Labs” beta inside Google Ads, giving app advertisers early access to experimental campaign features before wider rollout. What’s new. A dedicated tab within the App advertising hub where advertisers can try limited-time experiments, provide feedback, and explore tools still in development. Why we care. Google is giving early access to experimental features in Google Ads before they roll out widely. That means a chance to test, learn, and optimize ahead of competitors. Those who adopt early can gain a performance edge and adapt faster as new tools become standard. Zoom in. Features in App Labs are not guaranteed to launc…

Google has introduced new capabilities within its new customer acquisition goals, including high-value customer bidding and retention targeting. Most Google Ads strategies still treat new customers as inherently more valuable. That assumption breaks down quickly. Not every new customer is worth acquiring, and not every existing customer is worth ignoring. Just because someone buys once doesn’t make them a customer for life. Likewise, some past buyers are far more likely to convert again than a net-new user. This is where Google’s high-value customer and retention bidding goals start to matter. How high-value customer bidding works in Google Ads Google u…

Google has confirmed a bug with the Google Search Console performance reports that specifically impacts “Job listing” and “Job details” search appearance filter. Starting April 16th Google had an issue logging this data. So Google is reporting zero clicks and impressions for these jobs reports. What Google said. Google wrote: “A logging error is preventing Search Console from reporting impressions and clicks for “Job listing” and “Job details” Search appearance types from April 16, 2026 onward. We’re working to resolve this issue. This issue affects data logging only.” Complaints. We first began noticing the complaints trickling in earlier this week, with…

Most enterprise SEO strategies die in slide decks. Beautiful presentations, airtight data, and solid recommendations, all collecting dust because nobody bought in. I’ve watched it happen at companies with eight-figure marketing budgets. I’ve also watched a single SEO insight convince a company to create an entirely new business unit and make a multimillion-dollar investment. The difference had nothing to do with the quality of the SEO work. I’ve spent 17 years finding out what it actually comes down to. Let me walk you through how to build an SEO strategy that gets the attention it deserves. The two ways enterprise SEO strategies fail Before I get into wha…

For a long time, we defined SEO success by rankings and traffic. If you reached the top of the search results and brought people to your site, you did your job. That approach worked when discovery was linear, and search engines were the primary gatekeepers. But modern search behavior does not stop at discovery. Users want clarity, reassurance, and confidence before they make decisions. With so many options to choose from, users want to understand what a product does, how it compares to alternatives, and whether it fits their needs. There is a shift in SEO, one that pushes closer to product thinking and long-term value creation. Search engines reward content and experi…

Search campaigns often see strong early gains — more visibility, traffic, and conversions. But that growth doesn’t last forever. At some point, performance stalls, whether it shows up as a plateau, volatility, or rising costs. That slowdown isn’t necessarily a failure. More often, it signals limits in demand, targeting, conversion, or execution — the challenge is figuring out which one. Search performance doesn’t stay linear, and once early wins are exhausted, quick gains become harder to find. When growth stalls, the instinct is to do more — launch campaigns, publish content, increase spend. But without understanding the constraint, that effort can miss the mark.…

OpenAI is shifting its ad model inside ChatGPT from pure impressions to performance, a move that puts it in more direct competition with Google’s core business. What’s happening. OpenAI has begun testing cost-per-click (CPC) ads within ChatGPT, allowing advertisers to pay only when users click rather than when ads are shown. Early reports suggest clicks are being priced in the $3 to $5 range, and the feature is rolling out through a limited ads manager alongside the earlier CPM-based model. Why now. Pricing pressure appears to be a key driver. ChatGPT’s CPMs have fallen significantly since launch, dropping from around $60 to closer to $25 in some cases. Moving to …

Google is rolling out App Consent Insights in Google Ads, giving advertisers a clearer view into how consent signals impact app campaign performance. What’s new. The new diagnostics view breaks down consent data across apps, platforms, regions, and traffic sources, helping marketers pinpoint gaps in their setup. Zoom in. Advertisers can see an overall consent rating — like “Excellent,” “Good,” or “Poor” — alongside a live count of apps actively sending consented data. A detailed table also shows consent rates for conversions, including splits between EEA and non-EEA users. Why we care. As privacy regulations tighten, consent isn’t just a compliance box — i…

Advertisers are sharing their experience of a new Ads Manager interface for ChatGPT, signaling a shift toward a more mature advertising platform with real-time campaign control. What’s new. The Ads Manager is described as a dashboard where marketers can run, monitor, and optimize campaigns in real time — a major step up from current reporting and controls. Digital marketers Juozas Kaziukėnas and Glenn Gabe shared images of what they saw. Why we care. Until now, ChatGPT ads have been early-stage and limited, with advertisers reportedly relying on basic reporting like weekly CSV files. The move to a full Ads Manager suggests OpenAI is building infra…

Google is updating how Google Ads paces budgets for campaigns using ad schedules, shifting toward full monthly spend targets regardless of how many days ads actually run. What’s changing. Starting June 1, campaigns will pace toward the full monthly budget limit (30.4x the daily budget), even if ads are only eligible to run on certain days. Previously, pacing was typically based on the number of active days in the schedule. What’s not changing. Daily and monthly caps remain the same. Campaigns still won’t exceed 2x the daily budget in a single day or 30.4x over a month, and ads won’t serve on disabled days. Why we care. Advertisers using limited schedules —…

Attention is fragmenting further every day as the platforms providing information continue to multiply. There are new players on the scene, like AI search, while companies build proprietary spaces through social networks and communities. Smaller spaces pop up daily through vibe-coded apps. Many of these platforms are noisier than ever, with everyone demanding our attention at once. We’re drowning in information, and trust is eroding in sources like search engines and social media. We still use these platforms for research, but go elsewhere to validate what we find and make decisions. We’re shifting back to a source we’ve trusted since the beginning: other peop…

You can now do in 20 minutes what used to take a full afternoon. Feed two Semrush exports into Claude or ChatGPT, and you’ll get a polished competitor analysis – complete with topic clusters, gap tables, and prioritized briefs. The output looks convincing. The tables are clean. The recommendations sound confident. That’s the problem. AI can organize and summarize data quickly, but it can’t make strategic decisions. Without the right workflow, prompts, and validation, you risk acting on insights that sound right but lack depth. Used correctly, though, AI can surface meaningful patterns – revealing differences in topical depth, content coverage, and authority si…

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…

You’ve been told to follow a familiar set of rules for years: always use high-quality creative, keep your brand polished, stay scripted, and follow platform-recommended formats. If you’ve been in ad accounts lately or browsing feeds, you may have noticed something. Attention-grabbing ads don’t always follow those rules. They’re scrappier, less polished, and sometimes even called “ugly ads.” The beauty is that they’re coming out on top. More brands are breaking best practices on purpose to stand out. After all, best practices are an average of what worked best for everyone else in the last six months, give or take. By the time a tactic becomes a platform-recommend…

Most SEO strategies are built with one goal: getting people through the door. That usually means driving traffic to the website, ranking for high-volume keywords, and bringing in new users. But what happens after someone signs up or makes a purchase? That part of the funnel often gets ignored. SEO doesn’t stop at acquisition. It can and should be used to support retention, improve onboarding or post-purchase experience, and make your product or offering easier to understand. So let’s break down the opportunity in post-conversion content, why it matters for SEO, and how to identify and optimize it effectively. Table of contents Most brands stop too early The opportun…

AI isn’t just changing search — it’s deciding which brands get ignored. At Adobe Summit today, Andrew Warden, CMO of Semrush, argued that visibility has fundamentally changed — and that brands now risk being systematically filtered out by AI systems. “The idea of standing out is no longer optional. There’s a real risk of sameness,” Warden said. Because AI systems decide what to surface and what to ignore, brands now must compete for visibility in answers. AI is changing how discovery works You can already see the shift in the data, as 60% of Google searches now end without a click to a website. Users are still searching, but they’re not always visi…

Google is upgrading Google Ads call campaign measurement with a new AI-qualified call leads feature, designed to optimize for lead quality — not just call length. What’s new. AI-qualified call leads use machine learning to analyze calls and determine whether they represent meaningful business opportunities. The system then feeds that higher-quality data into bidding and reporting. Zoom in. Advertisers will get AI-generated call summaries and tags, giving more transparency into what happened during each interaction. At the same time, smart bidding can prioritize higher-value leads based on these signals rather than simple time thresholds. Why we care. Call camp…

The industry has been building top-down for 30 years. Start with awareness, get in front of as many people as possible, and work them down through the acquisition funnel. The logic made sense in the broadcast era, and it wasn’t entirely wrong in the search era. In AI-driven environments, it’s simply wrong. Search engines, assistive engines, and agents build their ability to recommend your brand from the bottom up. They need to understand who you are before they can evaluate whether you’re credible. They need to evaluate your credibility before they recommend you to anyone. If you build from the top down, you’re wasting budget on awareness while the engi…

Google is adding three new “agentic” safety features to Ads Advisor, its AI assistant inside Google Ads, aimed at reducing manual work while tightening security and compliance. As campaigns grow more complex, advertisers are spending more time fixing policy issues, managing access, and handling certifications. Google’s pitch: let AI handle the heavy lifting so marketers can focus on performance. What’s new. The update introduces proactive troubleshooting, always-on security monitoring, and instant certifications — all powered by AI and Gemini capabilities. Zoom in: Ads Advisor can now flag and help resolve policy violations automatically, even before adve…

Creating video content takes time and budget, so understanding how it performs is critical. YouTube’s native analytics in YouTube Studio are robust, but they’re locked behind account access. That can make reporting difficult — especially when you need to share data or don’t have direct login access. Moving that data into Google Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio) makes it easier to analyze and distribute. With Data Studio, you can: Pull YouTube data into reports you already use. Schedule automated updates for stakeholders. Customize dashboards around the metrics that matter. Track performance without relying on backend access. Here’s how to …

Search has changed, and brands need to catch up fast, according to IBM’s Alexis Zamkow (global lead of Marketing Transformation solutions) and Sandhya Ranganathan Iyer (associate partner – AI), speaking yesterday at Adobe Summit. AI tools don’t just help people search. They answer questions, compare products, and recommend brands. In many cases, users never even visit a website. That means if your brand isn’t part of the AI-generated answer, you may not be part of the decision. To keep up, brands need more than new tactics. They need a system — a GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) playbook. Here’s a recap of their presentation, Adapt or Disappear: How Brands…

Microsoft is rolling out a suite of updates across Microsoft Advertising to help brands stay visible — not just to people, but to AI agents increasingly making decisions on their behalf. What’s new. The update spans measurement, commerce, and media, with new tools designed to help advertisers show up in AI-driven experiences and transactions. On the ads side. Microsoft is introducing AI Max for Search campaigns, which expands query matching and personalizes ad delivery across AI surfaces like Copilot and Bing. It’s also launching “Offer Highlights,” new ad formats that surface key selling points — like free shipping — directly within AI conversations. Zoom in:…

Picture this: Your company relies on Data Studio for SEO reporting. It’s right before your next big meeting when you’re planning to present results… but Data Studio has an outage (again) and suddenly you have nothing to show. That’s embarrassing. And it happens more than it should. It wasn’t even a year ago that I touted the benefits of Looker Studio (now Data Studio) for SEO reporting. Now the platform feels archaic compared to the agentic coding tools available today. Here’s how rigid SEO dashboards like those produced in Data Studio are holding you back and why code-driven SEO reporting is the only way to remain efficient and competitive. The pr…

Demand Gen campaigns have high visibility across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. However, they pose a key challenge: the “attribution illusion.” You’ll often question whether reported conversions in the platform are truly incremental or if these users would’ve converted through search either way. That’s why in November, Google launched asset uplift experiments, giving you the ability to measure the impact of Demand Gen creative through an A/B split test. This means you can replace assumptions with a clearer view of what’s actually driving incremental results. Relying too heavily on creative instinct or default reporting can lead you down an inefficient path and dive…

For 20 years, Google Ads management has followed the same basic model: you log in, review performance, make changes, and hope they work before the next check-in. Agencies, freelancers, and in-house teams all work this way, even as the tools have changed. Spreadsheets gave way to scripts, and scripts gave way to automated bidding, but the core loop never changed — someone still had to sit in the account. groas aims to change that model by introducing a system designed to automate campaign execution end-to-end. Our company announced today it has developed a fully end-to-end autonomous system that’s designed to match or exceed PPC performance benchmarks observed…