SEO Tools and Resources

AI-powered search is moving fast. The latest shift? ChatGPT Shopping. Since April, OpenAI has been rolling out a shopping experience that surfaces product cards directly inside ChatGPT. Instead of sending users to a long list of search results, the interface now provides curated recommendations with images, labels, and “buy” links. For ecommerce SEOs, this is a new channel with very different rules. Placement isn’t driven by ads or bids, at least not yet. Instead, visibility depends on the quality of product data, structured markup, and external signals like reviews and mentions. The implications are significant. Results are condensed to just a handf…

Could ChatGPT launch an advertising product within the next year? The answer seems to be yes, based on internal OpenAI documents. OpenAI appears to forecast a billion dollars in new revenue from “free user monetization” in 2026. That figure is forecast to grow to nearly $25 billion by 2029 of OpenAI’s total $125 billion projection. The chart. Here’s a chart (shared by Juan González Villa on X) of OpenAI’s projection of rising revenues that includes “new products (including free user monetization).” Yes, that means ads: Why we care. ChatGPT has an estimated 600 million monthly users. The ability for advertisers to reach ChatGPT’s users represents a signif…

ChatGPT referral traffic converts worse than Google search, email and affiliate links, trailing on both conversion rate and revenue per session, according to a new analysis of 973 ecommerce sites. Why we care. AI search platforms are starting to refer meaningful traffic to retailers – but not yet sales. For now, Google (paid organic) search still wins on conversion and revenue per session. By the numbers. The dataset consisted of 12 months (Augusut 2024 to July 2025), 973 ecommerce sites, and $20 billion combined revenue. ChatGPT referral traffic was ~0.2% of total sessions – ~200× smaller than Google organic. >90% of LLM-originating ecommerce traffic …

In the last 24 hours, ChatGPT and Perplexity have introduced new AI-driven shopping experiences that aim to deliver more personalized product discovery and guidance. Both experiences are meant to help users find, compare, and purchase products through conversational queries informed by preferences and past behavior. ChatGPT Shopping research. OpenAI introduced shopping research, a guided buying experience that turns ChatGPT into a personalized product researcher. Users describe what they need (e.g., “quiet cordless vacuum,” “compare these strollers,” “gift for my art-obsessed niece”). ChatGPT asks clarifying questions, pulls price/spec/review data from the…

Chloe Varnfield, a digital marketing specialist at Atelier Studios with nearly eight years in PPC, joined me to share the mistakes that shaped her career — and the lessons every advertiser should take from them. When Google sneaks settings past you Chloe’s first story centers on Google’s account-level automated assets setting — a feature so well hidden that many advertisers don’t know it exists until a client sends a screenshot asking why their headline looks completely wrong. The setting, buried behind a three-dot menu, defaults to on, meaning Google can automatically generate and serve headlines advertisers never wrote or approved. The takeaway: always audit your…

Every business needs an online presence. Building a business website could be one of your most important decisions. But after that decision comes another question: Which platform should you choose to build your business site on? This depends on what kind of website you need, your resources, and your expertise. Table of contents Define your website’s purpose Do you have technical expertise and resources? Types of website platforms Scalability, customization, and security Budget and cost considerations Additional considerations and support Deciding on the business site platform Now, choose a platform for your business website Define your website’s purpose B…

Key Takeaways Choosing an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO impacts your online presence and future growth. Yoast offers reliability with over 15 years of experience and millions of active installations, unlike newer competitors. Innovations such as AI integration and a unified schema graph set Yoast apart from other plugins. Yoast provides comprehensive support, education, and a multi-platform ecosystem tailored for long-term success. Trust industry leaders like Microsoft and Spotify who use Yoast SEO to enhance their online visibility. Estimated reading time: 11 minutes Table of contents What really matters when choosing an SEO plugin Why legacy and pr…

Despite all the shiny new capabilities at our disposal, many professionals seem stuck in a cycle of “AI Groundhog Day.” You open a chat window, carefully craft a prompt, paste in your context, and get a great result. An hour later, you do it all over again. If this is how you use AI to automate, you’re still doing manual work — you’re just doing it in a chat box. To move from using AI to building with it, you need to shift from a human doer to a true human orchestrator. That means stopping one-off prompts and starting to build systems. In this new phase of AI automation, what you really need are AI skills. I explore this shift in my new book, “The AI Amplifie…

Claude Sonnet 3.7 is the top-performing large language model (LLM) – it outperforms competitors like Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and X’s Grok. That’s according to SEO agency Previsible’s new AI SEO Benchmark report. By the numbers. Claude Sonnet 3.7 “performed the best across the board,” earning an 83% score. But that score fell short against human SEOs (who scored 89%). LLMs averaged: 85% on content tasks. 79% on technical SEO. 63% on ecommerce SEO. Here’s how the other language models scored: Perplexity: 82% Gemini 2.5: 81% ChatGPT 4o: 79% ChatGPT o3-mini: 78% Copilot: 78% Deepseek: 78% Gemini 2.0 Flash: 71% Llama 4: 7…

Google has long been considered the gold standard for ad spend compared to social platforms. But scale doesn’t equal immunity. Click fraud remains a persistent risk, and the safety of your budget depends entirely on where your ads are running. While Google Ads offers immense reach, its campaigns aren’t created equal. Some are significantly more exposed to malicious activity than others. To protect your margins, you must understand what constitutes click fraud, where it originates, and how to shield your campaigns. What are invalid clicks? Invalid clicks are interactions that lack legitimate consumer intent. Because they aren’t driven by real human interest, the…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is upending the economic engine of the web, and Google is at the center of the disruption, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. What Prince said. In a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Prince said: “AI is going to fundamentally change the business model of the web. The business model of the web for the last 15 years has been search… search drives everything that happens online.” The Google tipping point. Google’s value exchange with content creators has collapsed, Prince said: “Ten years ago… for every two pages of a website that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. … That was the trad…

AI bots could outnumber humans on the web by 2027, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, as agent-driven browsing explodes alongside generative AI adoption. Prince made the prediction at SXSW, warning that bots are already reshaping how the internet is used — and how it’s monetized. Why we care. Search is shifting from human clicks to AI-generated answers. If bots become the web’s primary “users,” you’ll need to reshape your strategy to ensure AI systems can access, trust, and use your content. The details. Prince said AI agents generate far more web activity than humans because they gather information differently. A person shopping might visit five sit…

Cloudflare today announced a new feature that allows you signal via robots.txt whether your content can be used in Google’s AI Overviews (as well as for AI training). Cloudflare’s new Content Signals Policy is meant to give publishers more control over how crawlers and bots use their data, beyond traditional directives that only regulate crawling and indexing. How it works. The policy adds three new machine-readable directives to robots.txt: search: permission for building a search index and showing links/snippets (traditional search). ai-input: permission to use content as input for AI-generated answers. ai-train: permission to use content for traini…

Cloudflare has blocked 416 billion AI bot requests for customers since July 1, according to CEO Matthew Prince. To highlight Google’s massive edge in AI, Prince revealed that Google can see 3.2x more pages on the web than OpenAI. Why we care. Generative AI systems are consuming huge amounts of web content, and many publishers have no way to push back. Cloudflare’s numbers show how aggressively AI bots are scraping the web – and how uneven access is for the big AI companies. Driving the news. Cloudflare customers have been automatically blocking AI crawlers since the company launched its pay-per-crawl initiative July 1, Prince said yesterday at WIRED’s Big Intervie…

Cloudflare yesterday announced its new Markdown for Agents feature, which serves machine-friendly versions of web content alongside traditional human-facing pages. Cloudflare described the update as a response to the rise of AI crawlers and agentic browsing. When a client requests text/markdown, Cloudflare fetches the HTML from the origin server, converts it at the edge, and returns a Markdown version. The response also includes a token estimate header intended to help developers manage context windows. Early reactions focused on the efficiency gains, as well as the broader implications of serving alternate representations of web content. What’s happen…

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) formally designated Google with strategic market status (SMS) in general search and search advertising — giving regulators new powers to shape how Google operates in these sectors. What’s included. The designation covers Google’s general search and search advertising services — including AI-powered features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode — but excludes the Gemini AI assistant and certain news and syndication products. The CMA emphasized that the designation is not a finding of wrongdoing but enables “proportionate, targeted interventions” to ensure fair treatment for consumers and competitors. Why we care. Th…

Just 11% of U.S. consumers trust the first tool they use when searching online. That means nearly 9 in 10 Americans double-check or expand their search elsewhere “because they don’t trust the first answer,” according to new survey results from digital presence platform Yext. By the numbers. Discovery is fragmented: Traditional search still leads – 45% of U.S. consumers start product research on a search engine. But AI tools (15%) and review sites (14%) are fast-rising alternatives. Nearly three-quarters (73%) said they’ve used AI-powered search tools more in the past year, and 45% use them daily. Consumers still rely on traditional search for sensitiv…

“Content is king” remains one of the most widely accepted ideas in SEO. Not everyone has agreed. Different schools of thought have always existed, with some practitioners prioritizing backlinks and others focusing on technical SEO. Content is often treated as the primary driver of search visibility. I’m not arguing that. My point is simpler: if you’ve relied on content to drive results — and earn a living — you should start doubling down on distribution. With AI search changing the game, creating great content (and, yes, building some backlinks) is no longer enough to get it seen. The more important question may no longer be “What should I write next?” but “W…

If you’ve been working on your website for a couple of years, chances are that your website has become a giant collection of posts and pages. When writing a post, you might find out you’ve already written a similar article (maybe even twice), or you might get a feeling that you’ve written something related that you can’t find anymore. This can become even more complex when you’re not the only one writing for this website. Cleaning up your older content can be overwhelming; that’s why regular content maintenance is key. In this post, we’ll give you some tips to create a good content maintenance strategy! Table of contents 1. Reserve time for content maintenance 2. Wh…

As marketers, we love to explore emerging strategies and trends to stay ahead of the curve. However, what’s relevant and effective is always changing, despite countless case studies and think-pieces predicting the next big trend. Content marketing, in particular, is highly susceptible to speculation and testing because it is fluid and heavily influenced by consumers’ behaviors and interests at any given moment. This makes it interesting, innovative and challenging. So, what are the predictions for content marketing in 2025? Let’s dive in. 1. Spark inspiration with ‘visionary’ content Robert Rose recently covered an emerging trend – visionary conten…

For more than a decade, the dominant model was simple — identify a keyword, write an article, publish, promote, rank, capture traffic, convert a fraction of visitors, and repeat. But that model is breaking. Content marketing is collapsing and rebuilding simultaneously. AI systems now answer informational queries directly inside search results. Large language models (LLMs) synthesize known information instantly. Information production is accelerating faster than distribution capacity. Public feeds are already saturated. The cost of producing content has fallen to nearly zero, while the cost of being seen has never been higher. That changes everything. Here’s a…

Most SEO professionals give Google too much credit. We assume Google understands content the way we do — that it reads our pages, grasps nuance, evaluates expertise, and rewards quality in some deeply intelligent way. The DOJ antitrust trial told a different story. Under oath, Google VP of Search Pandu Nayak described a first-stage retrieval system built on inverted indexes and postings lists, traditional information retrieval methods that predate modern AI by decades. Court exhibits from the remedies phase reference “Okapi BM25,” the canonical lexical retrieval algorithm that Google’s system evolved from. The first gate your content has to pass through isn’t a neural…

AI won’t make SEO obsolete, but it’ll change how the work gets done. There’s a growing concern that as AI systems improve, they’ll replace the need for human SEO analysis entirely. Early experiments suggest otherwise. While AI can assist with technical tasks and even generate usable outputs, it still depends heavily on detailed human input, structured data, and technical oversight to produce meaningful results. The real shift is toward redistribution. AI is accelerating parts of the workflow, raising the bar for execution, and changing where human expertise matters most. Why AI hasn’t made SEO obsolete AI aims to reduce the need for semi-technical expertis…

Perplexity AI must stop using its Comet browser agent to make purchases on Amazon. A federal judge sided with Amazon in an early ruling over AI shopping bots. Why we care. The case targets a core promise of AI agents: completing tasks like shopping on a user’s behalf. If courts restrict how agents access sites, AI agents could face strict limits when interacting with logged-in accounts on major websites. What happened. U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney granted Amazon a preliminary injunction Monday in San Francisco federal court. The order blocks Perplexity from using its Comet browser agent to access password-protected parts of Amazon, including Prime subsc…

The U.S. Department of Justice successfully prosecuted its antitrust case against Google, with Judge Leonie Brinkema ruling that the company operated an illegal monopoly in the advertising technology industry. The court determined that Google engaged in anticompetitive practices that allowed it to dominate critical components of the digital ad market for more than a decade. The details. From the ruling: U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that Google “willfully engaged in anticompetitive acts” to control the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets. The court found Google illegally tied its publisher ad server and ad exchange together through both…