SEO Tools and Resources

Anthropic is drawing the line against advertising in AI chatbots. Claude will remain ad-free, the company said, even as rival AI platforms experiment with sponsored messages and branded placements inside conversations. Ads inside AI chats would erode trust, warp incentives, and clash with how people actually use assistants like Claude (for work, problem-solving, and sensitive topics), Anthropic said in a new blog post. Why we care. Anthropic’s position removes Claude, and its user base of 30 million, from the AI advertising equation. Brands shouldn’t expect sponsored links, conversations, or responses inside Claude. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is about to give brands the …

The U.S. Justice Department and a coalition of states plan to appeal a federal judge’s remedies ruling in the Google search antitrust case. The appeal challenges a decision that found Google illegally monopolized search but stopped short of imposing major structural changes, such as forcing a divestiture of Chrome or banning default search deals outright. What’s happening. The DOJ and state attorneys general filed notices of appeal yesterday, challenging U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta’s September remedies ruling, Bloomberg and Reuters reported. Mehta ruled in August 2024 that Google unlawfully maintained its search monopoly through default search agreements w…

If your CPCs keep climbing, the cause may not be your bid strategy, your budget, or even your competitors. You might be suffering from low ad quality. Let’s break down the most foundational — and most misunderstood — metric in your Google Ads account. If you want to stop overpaying Google and start winning auctions on merit, you need to understand how the 1-to-10 Quality Score actually works. The difference between Quality Score, Ad Strength, and Optimization Score Before we dive in, let’s clear up the confusion. Google shows a lot of “scores” and “diagnostics,” and you can safely ignore most of them. Quality Score is the exception. Ad strength is an …

Google may finally be starting to address a popular SEO and AI visibility “tactic”: self-promotional “best of” listicles. That’s according to new research by Lily Ray, vice president, SEO strategy and research at Amsive. Across several SaaS brands hit hard in January, a pattern emerged. Many relied heavily on review-style content that ranked their own product as the No. 1 “best” in its category, often updated with the current year to trigger recency signals. What’s happening. After the December 2025 core update, Google search results showed increased volatility throughout January, according to Barry Schwartz. Google hasn’t announced or confirmed any updates this y…

AI search hasn’t killed SEO. Now you have to win twice: the ranking and the citation. Google searches for almost anything today, and there’s a good chance you’ll see an AI Overview before the organic results, sometimes even before the ads. That summary frames the query, shortlists sources, and shapes which brands get considered. AI Overviews now appear for about 21% of all keywords, according to Ahrefs. And 99.9% are triggered by informational intent. Search rankings still matter. But AI summaries increasingly determine who wins early consideration. Here’s what we’re seeing: brands aren’t losing visibility because they dropped from position thr…

Google has updated two of its help documents to explain the limits of Googlebot when it crawls. Specifically, how much Googlebot can consume by filetype and format. The limits. The limits, some of which were documented already and are not new, include: 15MB for web pages: Google wrote, “By default, Google’s crawlers and fetchers only crawl the first 15MB of a file.” 64MB for PDF files: Google wrote, “When crawling for Google Search, Googlebot crawls the first 2MB of a supported file type, and the first 64MB of a PDF file.” 2MB for supported files types: Google wrote, “When crawling for Google Search, Googlebot crawls the first 2MB of a supported file type,…

One of the biggest reasons new advertisers end up in underperforming Performance Max campaigns is simple: they followed Google’s advice. Google Ads reps are often well-meaning and, in many cases, genuinely helpful at a surface level. But it’s critical for advertisers – especially new ones – to understand who those reps work for, how they’re incentivized, and what their recommendations are actually optimized for. Before defaulting to Google’s newest recommendation, it’s worth taking a step back to understand why the “shiny new toy” isn’t always the right move – and how advertisers can better advocate for strategies that serve their business, not just the platf…

Microsoft Advertising today launched the Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), a system that lets publishers license premium content to AI products and get paid based on how that content is used. How it works. PCM creates a direct value exchange. Publishers set licensing and usage terms, while AI builders discover and license content for specific grounding scenarios. The marketplace also includes usage-based reporting, giving publishers visibility into how their content performs and where it creates the most value. Designed to scale. PCM is designed to avoid one-off licensing deals between individual publishers and AI providers. Participation is voluntary, ownershi…

Vibe coding is a new way to create software using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Cursor, Replit, and Gemini. It works by describing to the tool what you want in plain language and receiving written code in return. You can then simply paste the code into an environment (such as Google Colab), run it, and test the results, all without ever actually programming a single line of code. Collins Dictionary named “vibe coding” word of the year in 2025, defining it as “the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to write computer code.” In this guide, you’ll understand how to start vibe coding, learn its limitations and risks, and see examples of great tools…

AI-powered search gutted LinkedIn’s B2B awareness traffic. Across a subset of topics, non-brand organic visits fell by as much as 60% even while rankings stayed stable, the company said. LinkedIn is moving past the old “search, click, website” model and adopting a new framework: “Be seen, be mentioned, be considered, be chosen.” By the numbers. In a new article, LinkedIn said its B2B organic growth team started researching Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) in early 2024. By early 2025, when SGE evolved into AI Overviews, the impact became significant. Non-brand, awareness-driven traffic declined by up to 60% across a subset of B2B topics. Ranki…

Innovations are coming at marketers and consumers faster than before, raising the question: Are we actually ready for the agentic web? To answer that question, it’s important to unpack a few supporting ones: What’s the agentic web? How can the agentic web be used? What are the pros and cons of the agentic web? It’s important to note that this article isn’t a mandate for AI skeptics to abandon the rational questions they have about the agentic web. Nor is it intended to place any judgment on how you, as a consumer or professional, engage with the agentic web. With thoughts and feelings so divided on the agentic web, this article aims to provi…

Digital PR is about to matter more than ever. Not because it’s fashionable, or because agencies have rebranded link building with a shinier label, but because the mechanics of search and discovery are changing. Brand mentions, earned media, and the wider PR ecosystem are now shaping how both search engines and large language models understand brands. That shift has serious implications for how SEO professionals should think about visibility, authority, and revenue. At the same time, informational search traffic is shrinking. Fewer people are clicking through long blog posts written to target top-of-funnel keywords. The commercial value in search is consolida…

Google spoke about its year-end report on the crawling challenges Google faced in 2025 when crawling and indexing the web for Google Search. The biggest challenges include faceted navigation and action parameters, which make up about 75% of those challenges, Gary Illyes from Google said. This was on its latest Search Off the Record podcast, published this morning. What is the issue. Crawling issues can cause your site to lag and slow, it can overload your server, and make your website unusable and inaccessible. If a robot goes off on your site and gets into some infinite loop of crawling, it can take some time for the site to recover. “Once it discovers a set of …

Microsoft has rolled out multi-turn search globally within Bing search results. Microsoft will add a Copilot search box to the bottom of the Bing search results, as you scroll down the search results page, this feature will dynamically appear. What is multi-turn search. This is when a searcher goes from the Bing search results, types in a follow up query into the Copilot search box at the bottom of the search results. Here is a screenshot of this feature: Here is a video of it in action: What Microsoft said. Jordi Ribas, CVP, Head of Search at Microsoft, posted this news on X – he said, “After shipping in the US last year, multi-turn search in Bing i…

I’ve spent over 20 years in companies where SEO sat in different corners of the organization – sometimes as a full-time role, other times as a consultant called in to “find what’s wrong.” Across those roles, the same pattern kept showing up. The technical fix was rarely what unlocked performance. It revealed symptoms, but it almost never explained why progress stalled. No governance The real constraints showed up earlier, long before anyone read my weekly SEO reports. They lived in reporting lines, decision rights, hiring choices, and in what teams were allowed to change without asking permission. When SEO struggled, it was usually because nobody rightfull…

As part of the v23 Ads API launch, Performance Max campaigns can now be reported by channel, including Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, Maps, and Search Partners. Previously, performance data was largely grouped into a single mixed category. The change under the hood. Earlier API versions typically returned a MIXED value for the ad_network_type segment in Performance Max campaigns. With v23, those responses now break out into specific channel enums — a meaningful shift for reporting and optimization. Why we care. Google Ads API v23 doesn’t just add features — it changes how advertisers understand Performance Max. The update introduces channel-level repor…

Search marketing is still as powerful as ever. Google recently surpassed $100 billion in ad revenue in a single quarter, with more than half coming from search. But search alone can no longer deliver the same results most businesses expect. As Google Ads Coach Jyll Saskin Gales showed at SMX Next, real performance now comes from going beyond traditional search and using it to strengthen a broader PPC strategy. The challenge with traditional Search Marketing As search marketers, we’re great at reaching people who are actively searching for what we sell. But we often miss people who fit our ideal audience and aren’t searching yet. The real opportunity sits at…

People inspecting ChatGPT responses are spotting references to ads in the page source. One line reads: “InReply to user query using the following additional context of ads shown to the user.” The reference appears even when no ad is actually displayed. Driving the news. Digital Marketer Glenn Gabe first flagged the issue on X after noticing the ad-related language in ChatGPT’s source code. Others have since replicated it while testing commercial queries like auto insurance. Why we care. Ads in ChatGPT have been talked about for weeks. This piece of code spotted signals that ChatGPT ads are moving from concept to near-launch, creating a new, high-intent adverti…

SEO has historically been an exercise in reverse-engineering algorithms. Keywords, links, technical compliance, repeat. But that model is being reimagined. Today, visibility is earned through trust, usefulness, and experience, not just relevance signals or crawlability. Search engines no longer evaluate pages in isolation. They observe how people interact with brands over time. That shift has given rise to human experience optimization (HXO): the practice of optimizing how humans experience, trust, and act on your brand across search, content, product, and conversion touchpoints. Rather than replacing SEO, HXO expands its scope to reflect how search …

Natural language is quickly becoming the default way people interact with online tools. Instead of typing a few keywords, users now ask full questions, give detailed instructions, and are starting to expect clear, conversational answers. So, how can you make sure your content provides the answer to their question? Or better yet, how can you make it possible for them to interact with your website in a similar way? That’s where Microsoft’s NLWeb comes in. Meet NLWeb, Microsoft’s new open project NLWeb, short for Natural Language Web, is an open project recently launched by Microsoft. The aim of this project is to bring conversational interfaces directly to websites,…

Ads are now being tested in ChatGPT in the U.S., appearing for some users across different account types. For the first time, advertising is entering an AI answer environment – and that changes the rules for marketers. We’ve used AI as part of ad creation or planning for years across Google, LinkedIn, and paid social. But placing ads inside an AI system that people trust to help them think, decide, and act is fundamentally different. This is not just another channel to plug into an existing media plan. The biggest question is not targeting. It’s psychology. If advertisers simply replicate what works in search or social, performance will disappoint, and trust may s…

Competitive research is a gold mine of insights in the world of organic discovery. Clients always love seeing insights about how they stack up against their rivals, and the insights are very easily translated into a multi-dimensional roadmap for getting traction on essential topics. If you haven’t already done this, 2026 needs to be the year when you add competitive research from answer engine optimization (AEO) (I’ll use this acronym interchangeably with AI search) into your organic strategy – and not just because your executives or clients are clamoring for it (although I’m guessing they are). This article breaks down the distinct roles of SEO and AEO competitiv…

For years, conversations about paid media have revolved around one question: should companies build in-house teams or outsource to agencies? That debate makes sense, but it misses the real issue. The problem isn’t where paid media sits in the org chart. It’s how performance leadership is structured. Many companies run Google Ads and other paid channels with capable teams, solid budgets, and documented best practices. Campaigns are live. Dashboards are full. Optimizations happen on schedule. Yet: Results stall. Pipelines flatten. Budgets get questioned. Confidence in paid advertising erodes. This is rarely a talent issue. It’s usually a structu…

On episode 339 of PPC Live The Podcast, I speak to Kirk Williams, a long-time PPC professional who’s been in the industry since 2009. Kirk is the founder of Zato, a specialist PPC micro-agency, and the author of Ponderings of a PPC Professional and Stop the Scale. He’s also a familiar face on the global conference circuit, speaking at events like BrightonSEO, SMX, HeroConf, and more. The big f-Up: Taking on the wrong clients Kirk’s biggest mistake wasn’t a platform error or a bad bid — it was taking on clients who weren’t a good fit. He explains that these decisions often came during moments of pressure: wanting to grow quickly, dealing with client churn, or na…

Google is experimenting with showing third-party endorsement content directly within Search ads. The test places short endorsements from external publishers under the ad description, including the third party’s name, logo, and favicon. What’s showing up. The test was first spotted by Sarah Blocksidge, Marketing Director at Sixth City Marketing, who shared a screenshot on Mastodon. In the example, a Search ad included the line “Best for Frequent Travelers,” attributed to PCMag, complete with the publication’s favicon. The endorsement appears directly beneath the ad copy, visually separating it from standard advertiser-written text. Why we care. If rolle…