SEO Tools and Resources

The narrative in SEO right now is simple: Google’s AI Mode doesn’t send traffic. If it becomes the default Google Search experience, your website will starve for clicks. There’s one problem, though: the studies claiming “AI doesn’t send traffic” focus almost entirely on informational queries. Yes, if someone wants to know what a basal cell carcinoma looks like, AI will kill that click. But what happens when someone wants to find a dermatologist to check that mole? No one has shared a study like that yet. So we decided to fix that. We ran the first UX study focused specifically on transactional intent in AI mode. We watched 52 participants across the U.…

Reels continue to surge as a go-to format for entertainment, education, and discovery. But Meta’s message to advertisers is clear: success requires native creative — not repurposed assets. Think 9:16 framing, platform-first audio, and rapid storytelling built for swipes, not scrolls. Brand advertiser takeaways (per Meta’s data): Show your brand early: Branding and messaging in the first 5 seconds makes ads 1.7x more likely to rank in the top purchase-intent tier. Use dynamic branding: Multiple brand appearances across scenes = 1.8x lift in top-tier purchase intent. Combine speech + music: Using both doubles the likelihood (2.0x) of landing in the top 20% fo…

A recent test run by the Adalysis team reveals that Google’s new AI Max setting is reshaping how search terms are matched and reported — creating blind spots for advertisers who rely on precise keyword control. When AI Max isn’t the right fit. AI Max isn’t inherently bad, but advertisers should think twice if: Broad match historically underperforms in your account. Your top exact/phrase match keywords are already constrained by budget. You prefer not to use text customization or Final URL expansion — both built-in components of AI Max. If you only need broad match, you can add those keywords manually and keep full control. How AI Max interacts with…

Google has changed its search bar on the Google home page by adding the ability to upload a file or an image, and then the user experience takes you directly to AI Mode. This is different from uploading an image and Google taking you to Google Search with image results and Google Lens features. Instead, this upload feature takes you into the AI Mode experience. What it looks like. Here is a video I made of the searcher’s flow: More AI Mode. Google continues to push searchers away from Google Search’s traditional search results, including AI Overviews, and directly into AI Mode. This includes Google most recently pushing searchers from AI Overviews into A…

Google’s Daily Hub is more complex than it first appears. It’s part of the broader acceleration toward hyperpersonalization we’ve been seeing in recent months – Preferred Sources, Profile Pages with followable elements in Discover, Brand Profiles in Merchant Center – all converging toward a single goal: anticipating your needs before you even formulate a query. Daily Hub is the concrete expression of the “News Digest and Daily Brief” agent identified during our investigations this summer into Google’s 90 AI projects via the AI Mode debug menu. The internal architecture of the system, which Damien Andell managed to decrypt and share with me in advance, reveal…

Managing budgets across multiple paid media channels is one of the most important skills in a PPC marketer’s toolkit. You’re constantly deciding how to allocate spend across channels and campaigns, how to handle big budget swings, and whether to set total or daily budgets. In an AI-driven ad platform world, campaign budgets remain one of the few levers marketers still fully control – and they deserve careful thought. Structuring your budget effectively Depending on your business model, you may have more or less input into the overall paid media budget. However, you usually have more control over how that budget gets broken out across channels and cam…

Google’s AI Overviews have reshaped search almost overnight. For paid search marketers, the fight for above-the-fold visibility is no longer just about ad rank – it’s now a push to appear above the AI result itself. This shift follows the rapid surge in AI Overviews that Adthena highlighted in our previous study. That analysis showed AI Overviews quickly moving beyond informational queries and into shorter, high-volume commercial searches. The mechanism behind this decline is clear: AI Overviews intercept attention, cut click-through rates (CTRs), and push both organic and paid listings lower on the page. The result: fewer clicks and less revenue. Adthena’s ne…

Today, we’re rolling out an improvement to Yoast AI Brand Insights, part of the Yoast SEO AI+ package. You can now scan how your brand appears in answers generated by Perplexity, in addition to ChatGPT at no extra cost. This builds on our mission to help marketers, bloggers, and business owners understand how their brand is represented across major AI platforms. AI powered answers are fast becoming a new gateway for discovery. People increasingly turn to AI tools to research, compare, and choose products or services. Those answers often mention brands as recommendations or sources. When someone asks a question in your niche, you should be able to see if your brand i…

Black Friday 2025 was a bit of a head-scratcher. Year on year, spend rose, impressions fell, but clicks and engagement stayed strong. The data (so far): Source: Optmyzr-connected Google Ads accounts (5,000+ ecommerce, 16,000 lead gen advertisers active both years). Conversion value and ROAS are still coming in — we’ll update when the full picture is ready. Two big takeaways: Visibility got pricier. Spend up ~17% across ecommerce and lead gen. Impressions fell year over year. Translation: advertisers paid more to reach roughly the same audience. Engagement held steady. Clicks and CTR up across the board. Lead gen saw slightly l…

ChatGPT is currently down for many users of the popular OpenAI service. When you try to ask ChatGPT a question, you likely won’t get a response. OpenAI confirmed the issue on its status page saying, “We’re currently experiencing issues.” OpenAI added, “We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation.” What it looks like. Many are seeing just a black dot as a response to their questions within the ChatGPT interface: Offline for many. The OpenAI status screen shows the uptime by service: Downdetector shows the service has been reported as offline by thousands o…

Google is expanding its customer lifecycle capabilities in Google Analytics, launching new audience templates and dynamic remarketing features designed to make high-value targeting and re-engagement easier for advertisers. Driving the news. Google has introduced two new suggested audience templates in GA to help advertisers instantly build lifecycle segments: High-Value Purchasers — powered by purchase count or lifetime value, with Google adding a new LTV percentile field so marketers can isolate their top-tier customers. Disengaged Purchasers — defined by days since last purchase, giving Google a built-in way to help brands re-engage lapsed buyers. Google…

Google launched a long-awaited update to Performance Max reporting, giving advertisers their first real look at how Search Partners contribute to PMAX performance. Driving the news. The update is now live in Google Ads, surfacing Search Partners directly inside the PMAX Channel Performance tables. Advertisers can now view: How Search Partners contribute to PMAX results Whether they add incremental value Performance compared with other PMAX channels Total spend directed to Search Partners What’s changing. This added transparency gives advertisers a clearer understanding of where PMAX allocates budget across channels — especially in search — and he…

Google is rolling out automatic linking between YouTube channels and Google Ads accounts when its systems detect a strong data relationship between the two — giving advertisers access to richer audience signals without manual setup. Driving the news. Google will begin automatically linking accounts when its signals show a “high-confidence connection.” Admins and channel owners receive an email 30 days before the link is created, giving them the option to opt out or link early. How it works If no one opts out during the 30-day window, Google completes the link automatically. Dual admins — with access to both accounts — can link immediately. Even after li…

Imagine telling someone that www.mysite.com/blog/myarticle and www.mysite.com/myarticle are actually the same page. To you, they’re the same, but to Google, even a small difference in the URL makes them separate pages. That is where the canonical tag steps in. In this guide, we will walk you through what a canonical URL is, how URL canonicalization works, when to use it, and which mistakes to avoid so that search engines always understand your preferred page version. Table of contents What is a canonical URL? How does URL canonicalization work? Why do canonical tags matter for SEO? When to use canonical tags? Implementing canonical URLs and canonical tags Implementi…

Performance Max (PMax) campaigns have become the cornerstone of AI-driven advertising. Both Google and Microsoft offer advertisers a way to consolidate creative assets, audience signals, and automation into a single campaign type. (Disclosure: I work as Microsoft’s product liaison.) While the concept is similar across platforms, the execution and feature sets differ significantly. This article aims to provide an objective comparison of Google PMax and Microsoft PMax as of late 2025. We’ll explore what’s universally true, what’s unique to each platform, and strategic considerations for advertisers looking to maximize performance. What’s universally tr…

Last month, I asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini the same question about three of my clients: “Who is [Brand Name] and what do they do?” Two out of three got it wrong. Wrong services. Outdated office locations. One even suggested a competitor as a better alternative. Here’s what makes that more than a curious mistake. What today’s AI errors reveal about brand visibility AI-sourced traffic jumped 527% year-over-year from early 2024 to early 2025. While that growth is real, it’s growing from a very small base. Most sites still see AI referrals representing less than 1% of total traffic. But when half the AI-generated descriptions of your brand ar…

Marketers have debated SEO versus PPC for years, usually shaped by whatever has worked – or failed – for them in the past. Organic search promises compounding visibility, while paid search delivers immediate control. Most teams ultimately favor one over the other based on experience, budget constraints, or a survival instinct. But in 2026, this old debate no longer fits the reality of search. Why this debate has changed The search landscape has shifted, and the old SEO-or-PPC debate no longer fits. Search behavior has evolved. Search results pages have evolved. The platforms – and the machine learning driving their bidding systems – have e…

Gary Illyes, an analyst with the Google Search team, posted his reaction to a Microsoft Bing article written by Fabrice Canel and Krishna Madhavan of Microsoft, about how AI Search is changing how conversions are measured. Coevolve. Gary Illyes wrote on LinkedIn, “I know for sure however is that SEM and SEO will need to coevolve with search, just like it has the past 30 years.” SEOs and SEMs will have to adapt as search evolves; which many SEOs have been doing since SEO became a service. And some of the best SEOs and SEMs have adapted and evolved over the years. SEO is not dead. Gary Illyes also said, “SEO is not dead.” Yes, these same best SEOs and SEMs…

OpenAI announced a visual upgrade to ChatGPT, adding more images from the web for answers about people, places, products, and other common topics. How it works. The update takes ChatGPT from simple answers to a more search-like experience: Images will appear when they add clarity. The web-sourced images will appear next to the most relevant text. Clicking an image will let you see it in its original dimensions and the source attribution. Where it’s live. This update is rolling out globally and gradually across all ChatGPT plans: It’s available on web, iOS, and Android. Works only with responses generated by GPT 5.1. Why we care. Search is be…

Google is quietly rolling out a new Performance Max feature that lets advertisers upload video files directly inside the “Edit assets” panel — no YouTube channel or Shared Library required. Driving the news. The feature, spotted in the Google Ads UI, adds a simple “Upload” tab during asset creation in PMax campaigns. A highlighted upload box now appears in the YouTube ad setup workflow, guiding users to drop in a video file and move on — significantly reducing friction for new video advertisers. How it works. Uploaded videos are stored in a Google-managed house channel, not the advertiser’s YouTube account. That means the assets can be used in ads, bu…

You’ve probably heard the saying: Fast, cheap, or good – pick two. The concept goes something like this: If you want something fast and cheap, don’t expect it to be good. If you want it good and fast, it’s going to cost more. And if you want it good and affordable, well, you’ll need to give it time. It’s a simple way to explain how tradeoffs work in projects. In SEO, these tradeoffs are especially important to understand because you’re often creating problems that will cost more to fix later. This article looks at variations of this project management concept and how it applies to SEO. Then I’ll explain why a quality-first approach l…

As shopping becomes more visually driven, imagery plays a central role in how people evaluate products. Images and videos can unfurl complex stories in an instant, making them powerful tools for communication. In ecommerce, they function as decision tools. Generative search systems extract objects, embedded text, composition, and style to infer use cases and brand fit, then LLMs surface the assets that best answer a shopper’s question. Each visual becomes structured data that removes a purchase objection, increasing discoverability in multimodal search contexts where customers take a photo or upload a screenshot to ask about it. Visual search i…

Google Posts now supports scheduling and multi-location publishing within Google Business Profiles. This should make it easier for you to manage your Google Posts for your business(es) and client(s). Scheduling. When you add a new Google Post within Google Business Profiles, there is a new option to “schedule this post.” You can then select a date and time for when you want the post to be scheduled. Lisa Landsman from Google said on LinkedIn, “plan your entire week or month in advance! You can now schedule your Google Posts to go live automatically at the perfect time.” Multi-location publishing. Also, if you manage multiple locations for a business and you wa…

Canonicalization has long been a core SEO practice, yet it’s still one of the easiest to overlook. At its simplest, canonicalization helps search engines identify the original source of content and prevents duplicate versions from competing with each other. Large sites rely on solid canonical structures to stay organized, and small sites benefit by avoiding duplicates that can dilute rankings and visibility. As we move into 2026, canonicalization is becoming even more important as generative engine optimization (GEO) rises alongside traditional SEO. With AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other generative systems shaping how content is selected, summa…

In recent years, the open web has felt like the Wild West. Creators have seen their work scraped, processed, and fed into large language models – mostly without their consent. It became a data free-for-all, with almost no way for site owners to opt out or protect their work. There have been efforts, like llms.txt initiative from Jeremy Howard. Like robots.txt, which lets site owners allow or block site crawlers, llms.txt offers rules that do the same for AI companies’ crawling bots. But there’s no clear evidence that AI companies follow llms.txt or honor its rules. Plus, Google explicitly said it doesn’t support llms.txt. However, a new protocol is now emergi…