SEO Tools and Resources

Leading SEO platform Semrush – the company that acquired Search Engine Land, MarTech, and Third Door Media in October 2024 – is being acquired by software company Adobe. Adobe announced the acquisition today. The all-cash deal is valued at about $1.9 billion and is expected to close in the first half of 2026, pending regulatory and shareholder approvals. What Semrush is saying. Andrew Warden, Semrush’s chief marketing officer, shared this on LinkedIn: Big news: Semrush has agreed to be acquired by Adobe. It’s a winning combination: Adobe brings leading customer experience orchestration in the agentic AI era with its content supply chain and other solutions.…

Google is rolling out new Google Maps features that will show searchers more information about nearby businesses and events. Plus, Google is allowing reviewers to use nicknames instead of their real names when leaving a review. Know before you go. Google is rolling out the “know before you go” feature within Google Maps. This is a feature we saw being tested before, both in Search and in Maps, but now it is officially rolling out in Google Maps. When you search for places in Google Maps, Google will show you a new section with “know before you go” tips. Google will show you information like parking tips, secret menu items, the best way to book a reservation, and d…

LLM-driven discovery is reshaping how readers find and evaluate information, yet most teams still don’t know what actually gets cited by ChatGPT. While early theories suggest that structure, freshness, or authority signals are the primary drivers, the actual drivers have remained unclear. To bring more clarity, I audited 15 domains in September across ecommerce, cybersecurity and tech, healthcare, data analytics, education, and local business. Together, these sites generated nearly 2 million organic monthly sessions and 7,500 direct referral sessions from ChatGPT. The analysis focused on blog posts – one of the most controllable levers for non-branded vi…

Affiliate marketing drives billions in sales – and billions more in hidden losses. Brand bidding, ad hijacking, coupon abuse, and more subtle forms of affiliate fraud can quietly drain ROI and distort attribution. For performance leaders, the question isn’t if this happens, but how much you’re already losing. This article breaks down the most common types of affiliate marketing fraud and shows how modern monitoring tools like Bluepear help brands protect growth, reputation, and spend through smarter affiliate fraud detection strategies. Why affiliate programs are under threat Not all affiliate programs are created equal – and neither are their incentive…

Every few years, SEO gets a shiny new acronym. Voice search. AMP. E-A-T. Each promised to rewrite the rules, and each eventually found its way into the same corporate graveyard of experiments and half-baked roadmaps. I know, because I bought in. For a year and a half, I buried myself in schema markup—building page-level knowledge graphs, connecting entities, mapping relationships until entire sites resembled semantic webs. It was meticulous, elegant, even beautiful in its own way. And it delivered nothing. Not because technical work doesn’t matter—SEO is inherently technical. The issue in enterprise is that Google is a black box. You can pour months into structured da…

I’ve straddled both the brand marketing and SEO industries for the past decade now. That dynamic has made it particularly interesting to watch how the concept of brand alignment has seeped into the search marketing vernacular. To quote my favorite baseball player, Yogi Berra, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” I’ve watched and I’ve observed how the conversation about brand alignment for LLM visibility has gone from “nice to have” to an absolute necessity. LLMs can expose a weak brand alignment while rewarding a strong brand alignment with increased visibility. With that, I want to kick things off by better explaining exactly what brand alignment look…

A new column called “Original Conversion Value” has started appearing inside Google Ads, giving advertisers a long-requested way to see the true, unadjusted value of their conversions. How it works. Google’s new formula strips everything back: Conversion Value – Rule Adjustments (value rules) – Lifecycle Goal Adjustments (e.g., NCA bonuses) = Original Conversion Value Why we care. For years, marketers have struggled to isolate real conversion value from Google’s layers of adjustments — including Conversion Value Rules and Lifecycle Goals (like New Customer Acquisition goals). Original Conversion value makes it easier to diagnose performance, compare data a…

Google announced the release of its latest AI model update, Gemini 3. “And now we’re introducing Gemini 3, our most intelligent model, that combines all of Gemini’s capabilities together so you can bring any idea to life,” Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai wrote. Gemini 3 is now being used in AI Mode in Search with more complex reasoning and new dynamic experiences. “This is the first time we are shipping Gemini in Search on day one,” Sundar Pichai said. AI Mode with Gemini 3. Google shared how AI Mode in Search is now using Gemini 3 to enable new generative UI experiences like immersive visual layouts and interactive tools and simulations, all generated completely on …

The AI resume has become a C-suite-level asset that reflects your entire digital strategy. To use it effectively, we first need to understand where AI is deploying it across the user journey. How AI has rewritten the user journey For years, our strategies were shaped by the inbound methodology. We built content around a user-driven path through awareness, consideration, and decision, with traditional SEO acting as the engine behind those moments. That journey has now been fundamentally reshaped. AI assistive engines – conversational systems like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity – are collapsing the funnel. They move users from discovery to dec…

By now, we’re all familiar with Google AI Overviews. Many queries you search on Google now surface responses through this quick and prominent search feature. But AI Overview results aren’t always reliable or accurate. Google’s algorithms can promote negative or misleading content, making online reputation management (ORM) difficult. Here’s how to stay on top of AI Overviews and your ORM – by removing, mitigating, or addressing negative content. How AI Overviews source information AI Overviews relies on a mix of data sources across Google and the open web, including: Google’s Knowledge Graph: The Knowledge Graph is Google’s structured database of …

Picture a chocolate company with an elaborate recipe, generations old. They ask an AI system to identify which ingredients they could remove to cut costs. The AI suggests one. They remove it. Sales hold steady. They ask again. The AI suggests another. This continues through four or five iterations until they’ve created the cheapest possible version of their product. Fantastic margins, terrible sales. When someone finally tastes it, the verdict is immediate: “This isn’t even chocolate anymore.” Aly Blawat, senior director of customer strategy at Blain’s Farm & Fleet, shared this story during a recent MarTech webinar to illustrate why 82% of marketing teams are fail…

Google is preparing a new Search bidding model called Journey Aware Bidding, designed to factor in the entire customer journey — not just the final biddable conversion — to improve prediction accuracy and campaign performance. How it works: Journey Aware Bidding learns from your primary conversion goal plus additional, non-biddable journey stages. Advertisers who fully track and properly categorize each step of their purchase funnel stand to benefit the most. Google recommends mapping the entire journey — from lead submission to final purchase — and labeling all touchpoints as conversions within standard goals. Why we care. Performance advertisers h…

Google submitted a compliance plan to the European Commission that proposes changes to its ad-tech operations — but rejects calls to break up its business How it works: Google is offering product-level changes — for example, giving publishers the ability to set different minimum prices for different bidders in Google Ad Manager. It’s also proposing greater interoperability between Google’s tools and those of rivals, in order to give publishers and advertisers more flexibility. The company says these tweaks would resolve the European Commission’s concerns without a “disruptive break-up.” Why we care. Google’s proposed “non-disruptive” fixes could pres…

Undoubtedly, one of the hot topics in SEO over the last few months has been how to influence LLM answers. Every SEO is trying to come up with strategies. Many have created their own tools using “vibe coding,” where they test their hypotheses and engage in heated debates about what each LLM and Google use to pick their sources. Some of these debates can get very technical, touching on topics like vector embeddings, passage ranking, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and chunking. These theories are great—there’s a lot to learn from them and turn into practice. However, if some of these AI concepts are going way over your head, let’s take a step back. I’ll walk you…

A leaked file reveals the user interactions that OpenAI is tracking, including how often ChatGPT displays publisher links and how few users actually click on them. By the numbers. ChatGPT shows links, but hardly anyone clicks on them. For one top-performing page, the OpenAI file reports: 610,775 total link impressions 4,238 total clicks 0.69% overall CTR Best individual page CTR: 1.68% Most other pages: 0.01%, 0.1%, 0% ChatGPT metrics. The leaked file breaks down every place ChatGPT displays links and how users interact with them. It tracks: Date range (date partition, report month, min/max report dates) Publisher and URL details (publishe…

Microsoft Advertising is rolling out Image Animation, a new Copilot-powered feature that automatically converts static images into short, dynamic video assets — giving advertisers a faster path into video without traditional production. How it works: Copilot transforms existing static images into scroll-stopping animated video formats. The tool extends the lifespan of strong image creatives by repurposing them for video placements across Microsoft’s global publisher network. The feature is now in global pilot (excluding mainland China) and accessible through Ads Studio’s video templates. Why we care. Video continues to dominate digital attention, wi…

Google is releasing some new ways to book your flights and hotels through AI Mode, plus new tools to plan your travel and find travel deals. These updates include Canvas in AI Mode for travel, flight deals rolling out globally, agentic booking for dinner reservations, flights and hotels. Some of these features are similar to the AI Shopping updates that Google announced last week. Agentic booking. Google in AI Mode can now not just recommend restaurants, hotels and flights but now also help you book them. We saw some of these features for reservations and events but that was while in Labs, opting into Labs is no longer required. Dinner reservations agentic …

Whether it’s Google signing Reddit to a deal to deepen its AI partnership, more traditional SEO results that have favored Reddit content, or Reddit’s share of ChatGPT references (down but still leading among social platforms), there are plenty of compelling reasons to prioritize Reddit in your organic strategy. That’s why it’s one of the first initiatives we tackle for new clients who aren’t yet building an organic Reddit presence. For clients already well underway with their core SEO strategies, we add it as a complementary layer. On its own, Reddit offers a strong pocket of qualified leads in discrete sub-verticals. Paired with the catnip-like appeal o…

“Work smarter, not harder” isn’t just a catchy phrase – it’s a survival tactic for content marketers. Keeping up with a full content calendar can feel relentless, and constantly creating new material is a fast track to burnout. That’s where content repurposing comes in, helping you get more mileage out of what you already have. Sure, there are plenty of familiar ways to repurpose content – breaking long blog posts into social snippets, turning video transcripts into articles, and so on. You’ve likely done them all. So what about the lesser-known approaches? The methods that few marketers think to use but should? That’s what we’re going to cover here…

Custom annotations are finally live within Google Search Console’s performance reports. You can now annotate reports directly within Search Console to avoid forgetting important key events; such as coding changes, algorithm updates, bugs on your website or more. What are custom annotations. Google explained that custom annotations are “Notes you create yourself to mark important events specific to your property, such as when you launch a new feature, or fix a bug on your website.” Google began testing this feature back in May 2025 and it is now live. What they look like. Here is a screenshot of a custom annotation in Search Console: How does it work. Y…

AI search evolves every month. This constant flux is reshaping which brands get visibility and which sources AI models trust most. We now have three months of data in the AI Visibility Index, tracking ChatGPT and Google AI Mode. The key takeaway: AI search is volatile. This is likely to be normal for the immediate future. The brands that win are monitoring and adapting to these changes in real-time. The research tracks 2,500 real-world prompts across five key verticals: Business & Professional Services, Digital Technology & Software, Consumer Electronics, Fashion & Apparel, and Finance. revealing seismic shifts in source diversity, brand mentio…

Google’s long-awaited total campaign budget option is now appearing in Performance Max campaigns across non-U.S. This could be the start of a global beta rollout. What’s happening: The total budget option now appears alongside the traditional average daily budget in PMax. Google previously said the feature would expand to Search, Shopping, and PMax, and this rollout suggests that expansion is underway. Marketers in the field — including those flagged by Thomas Eccel and shared by Mohamed Hamed (Turki) — are already seeing it live. Why we care. Advertisers have spent years manually calculating average daily budgets from fixed totals — especially painf…

YouTube is rolling out a beta feature that automatically lowers costs for underperforming Demand Gen Target CPA (tCPA) campaigns, aiming to keep advertisers closer to their desired CPA during the volatile learning phase. Why we care. The update gives advertisers a financial cushion during the earliest — and often most unstable — phase of YouTube campaigns, where conversion predictions can swing widely. It’s a rare instance of Google proactively refunding spend to protect performance targets. How it works: The system monitors new Demand Gen tCPA campaigns during the learning phase. If conversions fall below what Google predicted, it may retroactively reduce…

Most of what people are calling “AI SEO” right now is just legacy SEO with new buzzwords. AI SEO is different. When you look at how AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Mode actually source and compress information, there are things you can do that literally did not exist in the Google 10-blue-links world. This article walks through those AI SEO-only tactics, backed with real data, not wishful thinking. The context: clicks are collapsing, but answers are not You already feel this in your numbers. A few facts to anchor the conversation: Studies on Google’s AI Overviews showed click-through rates to top organic results drop by roughly 30 to …

While some SEO influencers are selling panic and “AI-proof” gimmicks, the data from Google’s front lines tells a different, more strategic story. The rapid integration of AI into search has created a wave of anxiety, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between durable strategy and distracting noise. The flood of information often leaves marketers unsure of where to focus their efforts. That’s the diamond in the rough that I discovered while attending the News & Editorial SEO Summit (NESS), which was held online Oct. 21-22. This article cuts through the hype to deliver clarity. I’ve distilled insights from technical SEO experts at Th…