SEO Tools and Resources

Search Engine Land is expanding its contributor roster in 2026 – and we’re looking for seasoned experts in SEO, PPC, AI, and analytics to join us. Why we care. Search Engine Land is not just our publication – it’s yours. For 20 years, Search Engine Land has been the go-to source for search marketing insights, reaching more than 1 million professionals every month. We’re growing again and want to amplify a trusted and diverse set of voices across the industry – whether you’ve been doing it for 5 years or you’re old enough to remember the Google Florida update. The details. We’re seeking contributors with 5+ years of hands-on experience in their field who can share …

Google’s AI Overviews continue to disrupt search as we know it. For advertisers, the landscape is shifting fast, with AI-generated answers now appearing on more queries and across more industries. Early Adthena data shows Paid Search click-through rates could decline by 8–12 percentage points (roughly a 20–40% relative drop) as AI-generated answers take up more space on the SERP. To understand the real impact of Google’s AI Overviews, Adthena’s data science team analyzed over 21 million indexes across two four-week periods (April – May and August – September) spanning five key industries: Retail, Travel, Finance, Healthcare, and Automotive. Our goal was to uncover…

Want your business to show up in Google’s AI-driven results? The same principles that help you rank in Google Search still matter – but AI introduces new dimensions of context, reputation, and reasoning, according to Robby Stein, VP of Product, Google Search. PR for AI. In an interview with Marina Mogilko of Silicon Valley Girl, Stein said AI “thinks a lot like a person would,” and agreed with her assessment that you’re investing in PR not for people to see it, but for AI. Stein said: “If you’re a business and you’re mentioned in top business lists or from a public article that lots of people end up finding, those kinds of things become useful for the AI to find…

AI may be reshaping search, but ads aren’t going away, according to Google VP of Product, Search Robbie Stein. What he’s saying. Asked by Marina Mogilko of Silicon Valley Girl whether Google Ads will go away in the future, Stein replied: “Don’t see them going away.” He added that user behavior is “really expanding” with AI, not shifting away from search. Google is already experimenting with ads inside AI experiences: “And so we started some experiments on ads within AI Mode and within Google AI experiences.” “We’ve been really focused on building great consumer products first and foremost… but I think users are starting to see some ads experiments there, too.…

FAQ schema is no longer a quick SEO win. In August 2023, Google reduced the visibility of FAQ rich results in search, restricting them to authoritative government and health websites. The update effectively rendered the tactic useless for marketers who once relied on it to expand their SERP real estate. Google also clarified that FAQPage markup should never be used for advertising or promotional purposes. It belongs only on genuine FAQ pages created to answer user questions. For years, many SEOs – including myself – added structured FAQ data to marketing pages as a best practice. It’s time to rethink that habit. Google’s shifting guidance isn’t new.…

Your website is live – now it’s time to measure what matters. To sustain traffic growth, you need to track performance, collect meaningful data, and make informed, data-driven decisions that shape your site’s success. Here are the key areas to monitor and the tools that can automate much of the work. How to monitor your website for SEO performance Website performance and uptime alerts When a page loads slowly, conversions drop, engagement falls, and the user experience suffers. Visitors expect pages to respond instantly, whether they’re comparing products or just beginning their research journey on your blog. Monitor site speed with PageSpeed Ins…

For years, I told bloggers the same thing: make your content easy enough for toddlers and drunk adults to understand. That was my rule of thumb. If a five-year-old can follow what you’ve written and someone paying half-attention can still find what they need on your site, you’re doing something right. But the game has changed. It’s no longer just about toddlers and drunk adults. You’re now writing for large language models (LLMs) quietly scanning, interpreting, and summarizing your work inside AI search results. I used to believe that great writing and solid SEO were all it took to succeed. What I see now: Clarity beats everything. The blog…

Regex is a powerful – yet overlooked – tool in search and data analysis. With just a single line, you can automate what would otherwise take dozens of lines of code. Short for “regular expression,” regex is a sequence of characters used to define a pattern for matching text. It’s what allows you to find, extract, or replace specific strings of data with precision. In SEO, regex helps you extract and filter information efficiently – from analyzing keyword variations to cleaning messy query data. But its value extends well beyond SEO. Regex is also fundamental to natural language processing (NLP), offering insight into how machines read, parse, an…

Advertisers are currently unable to access the Microsoft Advertising console right now. Microsoft confirmed there is an issue and that its engineering team is working to resolve it. This is impacting the web user interface to manage your Microsoft Advertising campaigns. What Microsoft said. Navah Hopkins, the Microsoft Ads Liaison, posted: “Confirming Microsoft Advertising UI is down. Our engineering team is investigating this issue with priority and we apologize for the inconvenience this may be causing. We will share more as we receive more updates.” How to check the status. You can go to status.ads.microsoft.com to check the status of Microsoft Advertisin…

SerpAPI said it will “vigorously defend” itself after being sued by Reddit for allegedly scraping and reselling data from the platform via Google Search results. The response. SerpAPI called Reddit’s language “inflammatory” and said it was “extremely disappointed” to learn of the lawsuit without prior communication. “Our work is guided by a simple principle: public search data should be accessible,” the company said. SerpAPI argued its position is backed by the First Amendment and called Reddit’s actions a threat to “the free and open Web we all enjoy.” What they’re saying. According to SerpApi: “For eight years, SerpApi has operated transparently and…

With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday season fast approaching, you’re probably knee-deep in holiday account planning. Today, we’re zeroing in on a Google Ads feature that you can use all year ‘round, but may be particularly useful to you and your customers during the holidays: Promotion assets. What are promotion assets in Google Ads? Promotion assets (formerly known as promotion extensions) are an optional addition to your Search or Performance Max campaigns. They allow you to highlight special deals, sales, and discounts your business is currently running, alongside your standard ad headlines and descriptions. Promotion assets can show on Goo…

Google is starting to roll out its new Text Guidelines feature in Google Ads, a tool first announced at the Think Retail event five weeks ago that gives advertisers more control over AI-generated ad copy. Driving the news. The feature, now appearing in some accounts, lets marketers set campaign-level text parameters — guiding Google’s AI to stay within brand tone, language preferences, and compliance requirements when generating text assets. Why we care. As Google Ads leans deeper into AI-powered creative, advertisers have been asking for stronger brand safety and message consistency controls. Text Guidelines offer a way to fine-tune AI output without sacrific…

More than a decade ago, I coined the term brand SERP – the result you get when someone searches for your name or company. I called it the “digital business card” because I saw firsthand how a messy one could cost a business trust and revenue. That idea shaped how many people think about online reputation and visibility, but the landscape has shifted again. \In the age of assistive and conversational AI – from ChatGPT to Perplexity to Google AI – a new and far more powerful asset has emerged: the AI resume. Unlike a brand SERP, which reflects what Google shows, the AI resume reveals what the machines themselves understand about your brand. It’s a liv…

The message from this month’s SEO Update is clear: AI and data accuracy are reshaping how we plan, optimize, and measure SEO. This is not just a slate of updates, but a signal to rethink impressions, content creation, and tooling so you stay effective. Chris Scott, Yoast’s Senior Marketing Manager, hosted the session. Alex Moss and Carolyn Shelby shared deep dives on AI trends, Google updates, and Yoast product news. Data and rankings in flux A key shift centers on data. Google removed the num=100 parameter, which changed how much ranking data shows up per page in Google Search Console. The result isn’t a sudden performance drop; it’s a correction. Impressions can …

Capturing intent at the precise moment consumers are ready to take action has always been the goal in search. But there’s value – and real payoff – in influencing that intent before the search even begins. As customer journeys grow more complex and span multiple touchpoints, the need to reach audiences earlier continues to rise. Connected TV (CTV) advertising offers that opportunity. It helps build brand awareness and consideration that drive downstream search behavior – all while maintaining the targeting precision and measurement capabilities search professionals expect. What is connected TV? Connected TV encompasses any television that offers …

Black Friday is when performance peaks — and so do risks. In 2024, global spending reached $74.4 billion, with U.S. online sales up 10.2% year-over-year. Behind that growth, affiliate competition and coupon activity surged, pushing paid channels to their limits. During these high-traffic days, even a single unchecked campaign can waste hundreds of thousands of dollars. Coupon fraud, coupon scam tactics and unauthorized brand bidding mess with your paid traffic, distort performance data and steal conversions that should’ve stayed yours. That’s why strong PPC compliance and continuous promo code monitoring aren’t optional — they’re what keep acquisition costs stable…

Yelp just unveiled its 2025 Fall Product Release, a sweeping AI-driven update that turns the local discovery platform into a more conversational, visual, and intelligent experience. Driving the news: Yelp’s rollout includes over 35 new AI-powered features, headlined by: Yelp Assistant, an upgraded chatbot that instantly answers customer questions about restaurants, shops, or attractions—citing reviews and photos. Menu Vision, which lets users scan menus to see photos, reviews, and dish details in real time. Yelp Host and Yelp Receptionist, AI-powered call solutions that handle reservations, collect leads, and answer questions with natural, customi…

OpenAI announced the launch of its first web browser, which they named ChatGPT Atlas. Atlas is currently available on Mac only right now and has all the features you would expect from an AI browser. But the most surprising part is that its built-in search features seem to be powered by Google and not Microsoft Bing, its early partner and one of its largest investors. How to download Atlas. If you are on a Mac, you can download ChatGPT Atlas at chatgpt.com/atlas. From there, the web browser will download to your computer, you double click on the installer and then drag the application to your application folder. What Atlas does. It is a web browser, first and forem…

Google Merchant Center is rolling out a new Issue Details Page (IDP) to help advertisers more easily diagnose and resolve account or product-level problems. How it works: Located under the “Needs attention” tab, the page provides a consolidated overview of current issues. It surfaces recommended actions, business impact metrics, and sample affected products — giving merchants a clearer sense of what to fix first. Why we care. Until now, identifying and fixing issues in Merchant Center often required navigating multiple sections and reports. The new Issue Details Page (IDP) in Google Merchant Center gives advertisers a single place to view and fix accou…

Google Ads appears to be testing an automatic assignment of New Customer Value within New Customer Acquisition (NCA) campaigns — and it’s doing so without advertisers’ explicit consent. The change, first spotted by performance marketer Bilal Yasin, has led to unexpected reporting shifts and frustration among advertisers. “Without any heads-up, and without it being in the change history, a new customer value has suddenly been applied to a customer,” Yasin wrote on LinkedIn. “It was set to 200 DKK… One thing is that Google has assigned a value, but another is that I can’t remove it again!” Why we care. Advertisers rely on New Customer Value settings to determin…

When you think of video advertising on YouTube, you probably think of ecommerce: Videos showing products. Influencers doing an unboxing. Other visuals of consumer products that lend themselves to the video format. Even Google’s own case studies for video emphasize consumer-focused themes. Just look at the analysis of the top 2025 video ads. See any B2B brands there? Me neither. It’s true that YouTube Ads perform very well for ecommerce advertising aimed at consumers. But YouTube can also help drive B2B leads. You might be scratching your head and saying, “But I’ve tried YouTube for B2B. It doesn’t convert.” And you would be right. YouTube…

Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is having a moment in marketing measurement. As privacy regulations limit user-level tracking, marketers are turning to it for reliable, cross-channel measurement. (We love it at my agency – MMM analyses often lead to smarter budget allocation with significant downstream impact.) But as adoption grows, so do execution errors and misconceptions about what MMM can and can’t do. Despite its strategic potential, it’s often misused, misinterpreted, or oversold – leading to costly mistakes and credibility loss from unrealistic expectations. MMM isn’t a black box. To produce meaningful insights, it demands context, strategy, iteratio…

A website redesign is essential for remaining competitive, but for multi-location businesses, the risks are much higher. Stripping away the local relevance that drives traffic to location pages can cause rankings and online visibility to plummet. Using localized content on location pages resulted in a 107% rankings lift, something businesses risk losing if a redesign hurts these pages. To mitigate the risk of fallen local rankings and to get the most from your website redesign, you need to maintain good multi-location local SEO and take key steps for a successful redesign. Prioritizing SEO during a location page redesign helps multi-location businesses stay co…

Google is rolling out a new video creation tool for its Demand Gen campaigns that automatically turns advertisers’ existing image and text assets into videos across all aspect ratios. Driving the news. According to a notice sent to advertisers, the feature will apply to all image-only ad groups created before August 27th, with auto-generated videos beginning to serve after October 31st — unless advertisers opt out. How it works: The tool pulls from current image and text assets to produce branded video variations. These videos are designed to extend reach across more channels and formats, optimizing for both vertical and horizontal placements. Adver…

Google’s crawl stats report is missing a single day of crawl data, which seems to be impacting all sites within Google Search Console. Google has not yet confirmed the issue but it seems to be impacting everyone. What it looks like. Here is a screenshot from one of my profiles within Search Console, showing the date that is missing for this site is October 14, 2025: Crawl stats report. The Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console shows you statistics about Google’s crawling history on your website. For instance, how many requests were made and when, what your server response was, and any availability issues encountered. You can use this report to detect whe…