SEO Tools and Resources

Generative engine optimization (GEO) platform Lorelight, is shutting it down – not because it failed, but because the problem it solved didn’t need solving, according to its founder Benjamin Houy. “Customers were churning because the product didn’t change what they needed to do. They would pursue the same brand-building fundamentals whether they had the data or not,” Houy wrote in a blog post. The big idea. Launched in April, Lorelight pitched itself as a “proactive AI brand monitoring” tool. Lorelight promised real-time alerts when large language models, such as ChatGPT or Claude, misrepresented a brand. The goal: To help marketers control their brand narra…

Table of contents How is Yoast SEO a game-changer for your Shopify store? Top Yoast SEO for Shopify Features to help maximize your Black Friday visibility Instantly generate SEO-friendly meta titles and descriptions with one-click AI SEO and readability analysis Automatic product structured data Optimize how your store appears on search and social media Other notable features Over to you… Before we know it, the winter hues will set in, and with them comes the biggest shopping day of the year: Black Friday. Black Friday 2024 was a goldmine for online businesses, clocking in record-breaking numbers. Online shoppers spent over $10 billion, marking a 10% jump fr…

With the new Yoast SEO Dashboard, you can see how your site is doing at a glance. Instead of hunting through pages, you’ll find all your key metrics in one place. It’s easy to spot which posts need attention, see where you can improve, and figure out what to tackle first so you can spend more time refining your content and less time searching for data. We know it can be challenging to improve your content when you have to dig through every post and page. That’s why we created a dashboard that instantly shows your site’s SEO Performance. It streamlines the process so you can focus on what matters: making your content shine. What you get from the Yoast SEO Dashboard…

Google’s unified video manager inside Merchant Center is no longer empty. After months of appearing in accounts without visible content, the Video Assets section is now automatically populating with sourced videos. Driving the news. The feature — first introduced at Google Marketing Live 2025 — was designed to centralize video content inside Google Merchant Center. It began rolling out in September, but many advertisers were seeing a blank interface with no assets displayed. That’s changed. Videos are now being pulled in automatically, including content from external sources like YouTube. Why we care, This confirms Google is moving ahead with its plan to make …

Thanks to AI-generated answers, CTRs are failing fast, and even page-one rankings no longer guarantee clicks. Google’s top organic results saw a 32% CTR drop after AI Overviews launched, plummeting from 28% to 19%. Position #2 fared even worse, with a 39% decline. Meanwhile, 60% of searches in 2024 ended without clicks; also, the projections show zero-click searches could surpass 70% by 2025. What does this mean for measuring success? Table of contents How does this disrupt traditional SEO? Evidence of a drastic CTA decline AI Overviews are the zero-click accelerator What CTRs miss in the AI search era? Six AI LLM optimization metrics 1. AI brand mention rate 2…

Representatives from both the Google Search and Bing Search teams are recommending against creating separate markdown (.md) pages for LLM purposes. The purpose is to serve one piece of content to the LLM and another piece of content to your users, which technically may be considered a form of cloaking and against Google’s policies. The question. Lily Ray asked on Bluesky: “Not sure if you can answer, but starting to hear a lot about creating separate markdown / JSON pages for LLMs and serving those URLs to bots.” Google’s response. John Mueller from Google responded saying: “I’m not aware of anything in that regard. In my POV, LLMs have trained on – rea…

Google Ad Manager and other ad services, including Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360, are experiencing technical issues, causing disruptions for advertisers and publishers. What’s happening. Google Ad Manager. Users have reported error messages, high latency, and other unexpected behavior since 10:00 UTC on Feb. 12. Some hosted video creatives are stuck in “Transcoding in progress.” Campaign Manager 360 & Display & Video 360. Issues began earlier, at 06:00 UTC on Feb. 11, affecting advertisers using these platforms. Why we care. Google’s ad platforms are critical for digital advertising, and any downtime can impact campaign perfo…

Google search ad spending grew 9% year over year in Q1 2025, according to new data from digital marketing agency Tinuiti. Increasing costs, rather than click volume, drove most of that growth. Google Search overall: Google Search spending grew by 9% YoY in Q1 2025 (down slightly from 10% in Q4 2024). Click growth was stable at 4% YoY. Whilst average cost per click (CPC) increased by 5% YoY. Google Shopping Ads: Shopping ad had a 8% YoY spending growth (however down from 10% in Q4 2024). Click volume improved by 9% YoY (up from just 1% in Q4). CPC remained stable at 1% YoY decrease. Competitive landscape. Amazon maintained a s…

Google quietly rolled out a new Sources column in its AI Max Search Term Reports – giving advertisers their first real look at where AI Max traffic is coming from and how Google’s automation is matching queries. What’s new. The new Sources data reveals how AI Max is driving traffic through: Landing pages and URL inclusions — showing which of your pages Google used to match search intent. AI Max expanded matches — indicating when traffic came from Google’s algorithmic expansions beyond your set keywords. Why we care. Until now, advertisers had limited visibility into how AI Max decides which searches trigger ads. This new data helps clarify whether traff…

Google has expanded Product Studio inside Merchant Center, rolling out three new creative features that go beyond its original image generation tool. What’s new. In addition to image generation, Product Studio now lets merchants animate static product images into short videos using suggested text prompts, a move aimed squarely at short-form ads and social-style creative. Google has also added one-click background removal to help isolate products and create cleaner, more consistent Shopping visuals. The third update increases image resolution, allowing advertisers to upscale older or lower-quality assets to meet modern visual standards. Why we care. P…

Google is rolling out asset-level reporting for Display campaigns, giving advertisers a clearer view of how individual creative assets perform — a move that brings Display closer to the transparency already seen in Performance Max campaigns. Why we care. Until now, Display campaign insights have been limited to overall ad performance. With this update, advertisers can analyze results at the asset level — images, headlines, descriptions — to pinpoint what’s driving engagement and what’s not. How it works. A new Assets tab in Google Ads will let users: Compare performance of each creative asset. View when assets were last updated to track iteration history. …

Google Ads is rolling out auto end screens — a new feature that appends an interactive, auto-generated card to the end of eligible video ads to nudge viewers toward a conversion. How it works. An interactive screen appears for a few seconds immediately after the video finishes playing. Content is auto-populated from campaign data — app name, icon, price, and a direct install link for app campaigns End screens appear by default on eligible ads, requiring no setup from advertisers Why we care. Advertisers no longer need to manually build post-roll calls-to-action. This feature is on by default and changes the end of your video ads — and if you’ve already…

Google has added a new user agent to its help documentation named Google-CWS. This is the Chrome Web Store user agent that is a user-triggered fetchers. More details. Google posted about the new user agent over here, it reads; “The Chrome Web Store fetcher requests URLs that developers provide in the metadata of their Chrome extensions and themes.” What are user-triggered fetchers. A user-triggered fetchers are initiated by users to perform a fetching function within a Google product. The example provided by Google was “Google Site Verifier acts on a user’s request, or a site hosted on Google Cloud (GCP) has a feature that allows the site’s users to retri…

Google is rolling out Campaign Mix Experiments (beta), a new testing framework that lets advertisers experiment across multiple campaign types, budgets, and settings within a single, unified experiment. How it works: Advertisers can create up to five experiment arms, each containing a different mix of campaigns. Campaigns can appear in multiple arms, with traffic split between them. Experiments support Search, Performance Max, Shopping, Demand Gen, Video, and App campaigns (excluding Hotels). Traffic splits can be customized (minimum 1%), with results normalized to the lowest split for fair comparison. What you can test: Budget allocation across…

Google Ads is rolling out new location targeting options for Demand Gen campaigns, bringing them in line with controls already available in Search. What’s new. Advertisers can now explicitly choose between Presence or interest and Presence only when setting up Demand Gen campaigns. The option is available directly in the campaign interface, eliminating the need for manual exclusions. Why we care. Until now, advertisers running Demand Gen had limited precision over geo-targeting. By making “presence only” targeting native to the campaign setup, Google removes a common workaround and the risk of accidental geo-leakage. The result is cleaner traffic, more accurat…

Google expanded Demand Gen channel controls to include Google Maps, giving advertisers a new way to reach users with intent-driven placements and far more control over where Demand Gen ads appear. What’s new. Advertisers can now select Google Maps as a channel within Demand Gen campaigns. The option can be used alongside other channels in a mixed setup or on its own to create Maps-only campaigns. Why we care. This update unlocks a powerful, location-focused surface inside Demand Gen, allowing advertisers to tailor campaigns to high-intent moments such as local discovery and navigation. It also marks a meaningful step toward finer channel control in what has tra…

Google has updated its Merchant listing structured data guidelines to add a new beta for member pricing priceType, aka validForMemberTier property. Google also clarified the active prices, sale prices, strikethrough prices with more examples and instructions. What Google said. Google added examples and instructions for using the priceType property and new beta validForMemberTier property to encode active prices, sale prices, strikethrough prices, and member prices in JSON-LD to the Merchant listing structured data guidelines, the search company announced. They did this to “make it easier for merchants to specify complex pricing through structured data and bring pa…

Google is quietly giving advertisers more granular control over how data flows when consent is limited. Driving the news. A new feature called Data Transmission Control is appearing in Google Ads, adding an extra layer on top of Advanced Consent Mode that determines how advertising, analytics and diagnostic data are actually transmitted. What’s new. Advertisers can now independently restrict advertising data, behavioral analytics and diagnostic data. When ad_storage consent is denied, there are two options: allow limited advertising data with identifiers redacted (while still enabling conversion modeling), or block advertising data entirely until consent is grante…

Google rolled out a small but practical update to Performance Max that makes reviewing creatives faster and less clunky. What’s new. Advertisers can now click directly on images or videos inside the Asset Groups table to instantly preview how ads will appear across different Performance Max placements — without leaving the page. Why we care. Previously, checking creative previews meant digging into separate views or settings. This change keeps advertisers in the workflow, cutting down friction during creative QA and iteration. Between the lines. Performance Max is often criticized for limited transparency, so even incremental UI improvements that surface c…

Google is enhancing Meridian, its open-source Marketing Mix Model (MMM), to help marketers make smarter, more precise budget decisions. Why we care. Understanding ROI across channels is increasingly critical. These new Meridian updates allow for a more precise understanding of what drives sales, factoring in both media spend and non-media variables like pricing and promotions. The big picture. Here’s what’s new: Non-media variables: Marketers can now include pricing, promotions, and other business levers to measure their impact on sales more accurately. Channel-level contribution priors: New features let you guide the MMM with your own business knowledge,…

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 a significant update to its Performance Max campaigns, giving advertisers more transparency and control over their ad placements. The big picture: Performance Max search terms are now visible in the standard Search Terms report Advertisers can add negative keywords directly from the report The update integrates with Google’s recent addition of negative keyword capabilities for Performance Max Why we care. This change addresses one of the biggest criticisms of Performance Max campaigns: lack of visibility into which search queries trigger ads. Advertisers now have the same level of insight and control they’re accustomed to with stan…

Google updated its Ads Transparency policy to show more detailed information about the entities funding ads – a move aimed at increasing accountability in digital advertising. Driving the news. Starting today, Google is displaying the payer name – drawn from an advertiser’s payment profile – if it differs from their verified advertiser name. For agency accounts, the client’s payment profile will be used as the payer name when applicable. This information will appear in the My Ad Center panel and the Ads Transparency Center. Why we care. This update increases public visibility into who is actually funding ads, which can impact brand perception, trust, and comp…

Google Ads rolled out a data source diagnostics feature inside Data Manager that helps advertisers monitor the health of their data connections. The tool flags issues tied to offline conversions, CRM imports, and tagging mismatches. How it works. A centralized dashboard assigns clear connection status labels — Excellent, Good, Needs attention, or Urgent — and surfaces actionable alerts. Advertisers can see problems like refused credentials, formatting errors, and failed imports alongside a run history showing recent sync attempts and error counts. Why we care. When conversion data breaks, campaign optimization breaks with it. Even small data connection failure…

Google Ads has quietly rolled out multi-party approval, a security feature that requires a second administrator to approve certain high-risk account actions. These include adding or removing users and changing user roles. Why we care. As ad accounts grow larger — and more valuable — access control has become a bigger risk. A single unauthorized, malicious or accidental account change can disrupt campaigns, access, and billing in minutes. Multi-party approval reduces that risk by requiring a second admin sign-off on high-impact actions, adding protection without changing day-to-day campaign management. For agencies and large teams especially, it helps prevent cost…