SEO Tools and Resources

Pages that rank for Google’s AI Overview “fan-out” queries are much more likely to be cited than those that rank only for the main search query, according to data from Surfer SEO. An analysis of 10,000 keywords found a strong correlation (Spearman 0.77) between how many fan-out queries a page ranks for and its likelihood of being cited in Google’s AI Overviews. By the numbers. Pages ranking for fan-out queries are 161% more likely to be cited than pages ranking only for the main query. Also: 76% of the sampled keywords triggered AI Overviews. 33,000 fan-out queries were extracted using Gemini. Pages ranking for both the main query and at least one fan-…

Google made another change to the JavaScript SEO documentation help document to explain and clarify JavaScript execution on non-200 HTTP status codes. The change. Google wrote, “All pages with a 200 HTTP status code are sent to the rendering queue, no matter whether JavaScript is present on the page.” “If the HTTP status code is non-200 (for example, on error pages with 404 status code), rendering might be skipped,” Google added. Google also clarified that Googlebot queues all pages with a 200 HTTP status code for rendering. Here is the section that was updated: Google explained, “While pages with a 200 HTTP status code are sent to rendering, this mi…

Incrementality testing in Google Ads is suddenly within reach for far more advertisers than before. Google has lowered the barriers to running these tests, making lift measurement possible even without enterprise-level budgets, as recently reported in Search Engine Land. That shift naturally raises a question: How is Google able to measure incrementality with so much less data? For years, reliable lift measurement was assumed to require large budgets, long test windows, and a tolerance for inconclusive results. So when Google claims it can now deliver more accurate results with as little as $5,000 in media spend, it understandably sounds like marketing sp…

Apple plans to introduce additional ads within App Store search results starting in 2026, expanding its search ad inventory while keeping strict limits on how advertisers can influence placement. What’s changing. The new ads will appear inline within App Store search results, alongside organic listings. Existing ads at the top of search results will remain unchanged. Apple says advertisers don’t need to take any action to appear in the new placements — and, notably, they can’t. What Apple is saying. In guidance shared with Apple Insider, Apple emphasized that relevance is non-negotiable: “If your app isn’t relevant to what the user is searching for, it won’t …

Missed the final SEO Update by Yoast of 2025? Our in-house principal SEOs, Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, broke down December’s biggest search shifts, from Gemini’s integration to Google’s publisher deals, and answered your burning questions. Don’t forget to watch the replay and sign up for the next edition! Watch the full replay below (or read on for the highlights). 2025 in a nutshell: The three biggest SEO shifts 2025 was the year AI officially took over search. Here’s what mattered most: From rankings to retrieval: AI overviews and chat interfaces made being cited more important than ranking #1. EEAT became non-negotiable: Google (and users) demand…

If you’re leading marketing right now, you’re probably knee-deep in planning season, and feeling a tension I hear from CMOs and VPs every year: “We build a plan, but the execution never matches the intent.” Sound familiar? You aren’t alone. The disconnect isn’t because goals were wrong or strategies were flawed. It’s because most SEO plans aren’t built to survive operational constraints: Shifting priorities. Surprise product launches. Algorithm updates. The inevitable “can you just quickly…” requests that derail your roadmap by March. After helping many businesses build SEO strategies, I’ve learned this: the winners aren’t the ones w…

Pages on your website can be well written, well laid out, supported by backlinks, and even meet E-E-A-T expectations – yet still fail to rank. While there are many possible explanations, one common issue is a misalignment with search intent, and it’s often harder to spot than it sounds. When the focus is on content, optimization, and usability, intent can easily be missed or misjudged. This is where AI can become a useful review tool, helping guide things back in the right direction. Get back to basics Whether you’re starting work on a new page or updating something older, beginning with the basics of search intent can help set you up for success. …

Google Search Console appears to have fixed the month-long delay with the page indexing report just about an hour ago. The report is now showing data as early as a few days ago, which is the normal timeframe for when this report is updated. Plus, emails about indexing issues have started going out from Search Console to site owners again. Page indexing report. It shows which pages Google can find and index on your site, along with any problems. You can also submit fixes there and see whether Google confirms they worked. Site owners and SEOs were stuck, they were unable to verify their “fixes” and unable to see if new pages were being indexed and if old pages were…

Every week, new data highlights both the overlap and the divergence between effective organic search techniques across traditional SEO (Google SERPs) and GEO (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Perplexity, etc.). It’s a lot to absorb. One week, headlines say traditional SEO tactics work fine for ChatGPT. The next, you’ll see reports that one platform is elevating Reddit while another is dialing it back. Given how quickly this landscape shifts, I want to break down the approach, process, and resources my team is using to tackle content in 2026. This goes far beyond a content calendar. It’s about combining audience understanding, the interplay of organic platform…

We celebrated a major milestone in June: the return of SMX Advanced as an in-person event. It was our first since 2019. More than a conference, SMX Advanced 2025 was a reunion. Search marketers from around the world came together to connect, exchange ideas, and learn the most current and advanced insights in search. But search never stands still. With rapid shifts in AI SEO, constant algorithm changes, and the challenge of balancing generative AI with a human touch, the need for truly advanced, actionable education has never been greater. Help shape SMX Advanced 2026 We’re committed to making the SMX Advanced 2026 program our most relevant, advanced, and e…

Google Search Console seems to have fixed the weeks long delay with the search performance reports. For the past few weeks, we had 50+ hour delays for these reports, but as of the past several hours, the reports seem to be up-to-date. Now up-to-date. If you go to the search performance report, you should just see anywhere between about 2 – 6 hours of delay, which is typically normal. At some point over the past few weeks, the delays were over 70 hours. This is what I see: The delays started a few weeks ago and it took about three weeks to clear the delay and backlog of data. Page indexing report. Meanwhile, the page indexing report delay we reported ma…

Managing large catalogs in Google Performance Max can feel like handing the algorithm your wallet and hoping for the best. La Maison Simons faced that exact challenge: too many products and not enough control. Then they rebuilt their segmentation with Channable Insights and turned a “black box” campaign into a revenue-generating machine. Step 1: Stop segmenting by category Simons originally split campaigns by product category. It sounded logical – until their best-selling sweater ate the budget and newer or overlooked products never had a chance to surface. Static segmentation meant limited visibility and slow decisions. Marketers stayed stuck making m…

Doing SEO well often means knowing what to focus on and when to do so. That is not always easy, especially when you are juggling content, updates, and day-to-day site management. That is why we are introducing a new SEO task list in the Yoast plugin. The Task List helps you improve your SEO step by step, directly inside your dashboard. It turns best practices into clear, actionable tasks, so you can make progress with confidence and without second-guessing your work. Why the SEO checklist matters: Turn SEO advice into clear actions Instead of vague recommendations or long documentation, the Task List shows you exactly what to do next. Each item fo…

Google Ads introduced View-Through Conversion (VTC)–optimised bidding for Android App campaigns, giving advertisers a visible toggle to optimise toward conversions that happen after an ad is viewed, not clicked. Previously, VTC existed only as a hidden signal within Google’s systems. Now, it’s an explicit optimisation option. The shift. Google is continuing to move app advertising away from click-centric logic and toward incrementality and influence, especially for formats like YouTube and in-feed video. This update aligns bidding more closely with how users actually discover and install apps. Why we care. Advertisers can now bid beyond clicks, improvi…

Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, admitted that Google “for sure messed up” by underinvesting in AI and failing to seriously pursue the opportunity after releasing the research that led to today’s generative AI era. Driving the news. Google didn’t take it seriously enough and failed to scale fast enough after the Transformer paper, Brin said. Also: Google was “too scared to bring it to people” because chatbots can “say dumb things.” “OpenAI ran with it,” which was “a super smart insight.” The full quote. Brin said: “I guess I would say in some ways we for sure messed up in that we underinvested and sort of didn’t take it as seriously as we should have…

Google has updated its JavaScript SEO basics documentation to clarify how Google’s crawler handles noindex tags in pages that use JavaScript. In short, if “you do want the page indexed, don’t use a noindex tag in the original page code,” Google wrote. What is new. Google updated this section to read: “When Google encounters the noindex tag, it may skip rendering and JavaScript execution, which means using JavaScript to change or remove the robots meta tag from noindex may not work as expected. If you do want the page indexed, don’t use a noindex tag in the original page code.” In the past, it read: “If Google encounters the noindex tag, it skips renderin…

The SEO industry is entering its most turbulent period yet. Traffic is declining. AI is absorbing informational queries. Social platforms now function as search engines. Google is shifting from a gateway to an answer engine. The result is a sector running in circles – unsure what to measure, what to optimize, or even what SEO is meant to do. Yet within this turbulence, something clear has emerged. A single marketing metric that cuts through the noise and signals brand health and future demand. A metric that marketers and SEOs can align around with confidence. That metric is share of search. Discovery is changing, and measurement must chan…

As marketing channels and touchpoints multiply rapidly, the way success is measured significantly impacts long-term growth and executive perception. Click-based attribution – across models like last-click, first-click, linear, and time-decay – remains the default. But as a standalone measurement strategy, it’s showing its age. Click metrics now carry disproportionate weight in executive dashboards, and that reliance introduces real limitations. Click-based models can still reveal valuable insights into digital engagement. However, when the C-suite bases major budget and strategy decisions solely on clicks, they risk overlooking critical aspects of …

Google is rolling out a new Performance Max beta that lets advertisers pull video assets directly from Merchant Center — a small tweak with big implications for retail and e-commerce. How it works. Google Ads will now: Auto-surface product-associated videos from Merchant Center during PMax setup Shorten creative workflows for retailers and e-commerce teams Improve product-to-creative alignment, increasing ad relevance Boost performance, especially for large SKU catalogs Why we care. This update removes a friction point in PMax: getting high-quality, product-relevant video into campaigns. By auto-pulling videos from Merchant Center, Google is tigh…

When a TV commercial makes people feel something, it doesn’t just win in the moment – it sparks curiosity, drives searches, and fuels conversions. That’s why the “Breaking TV Ads Report,” jointly launched by Kinetiq and DAIVID, deserves a spot on every search marketer’s radar. The monthly report ranks the top-performing new TV ads in the U.S., blending Kinetiq’s real-time TV ad detection with DAIVID’s AI-driven creative analytics to uncover which ads broke through, why they resonated, and what brands can learn from their success. It’s a powerful reminder that search doesn’t start on Google – it starts in the mind. As Barney Worfolk-Smith, chief growth offi…

Every Black Friday reveals how consumers search, compare, and decide. This year added something new: a real-world test of how AI models interpret commerce under true demand. So we ran a structured test across major LLMs and analyzed 10,000 responses. The goal was simple: to see how these systems form their internal view of the retail landscape and which signals shape the answers they generate. As we reviewed the dataset, a clear pattern emerged: Black Friday acts as a natural stress test for AI-driven discovery. The sheer volume of queries, the range of categories, and the speed of shifting consumer attention expose the sources, structures, and behavioral tend…

For the past two years, we’ve been living in AI’s gold rush era. To borrow from Taylor Swift, think of it as the “Lover” phase where everything is shiny, new, and full of possibility. The behavior: Buy everything. The metric: Can it generate something cool? The vibe: Pure FOMO. But we’re entering a new era now. Call it the “Reputation” phase, which is darker, edgier, and entirely focused on receipts. A sign of this shift was in the headlines recently, blaring on about Microsoft lowering its AI sales targets. The hot takes rushed in to frame it as a disappointment, a slowdown, and even a sign that enterprise demand is cooling. They all misread the m…

After more than 15 years in enterprise SEO across six major corporations, I’ve seen more careers derailed by internal politics than by Google updates. Many SEOs moving from agency to in-house assume that staying current with algorithms and improving rankings will be enough. In reality, the harder work is navigating the organization and the people within it. Agency life rewards deliverables and reports. Corporate life runs on relationships, repeatable processes, the right platforms, and visible performance – all carrying equal weight with technical skill. The following lessons reflect where SEOs can grow, avoid common pitfalls, and build sustainable care…

On episode 334 of PPC Live The Podcast, I speak to Sophie Fell Head of Paid Media at Liberty Marketing Group about a real PPC mistake involving location targeting. The conversation focuses on how small oversights can have big consequences—and how to recover from them professionally. The PPC F-Up: worldwide location targeting Sophie accidentally launched a campaign with worldwide location targeting enabled instead of restricting it to the client’s service area. In just a couple of days, the campaign generated around 1,500 leads that looked impressive on paper but were unusable because they came from outside the target locations. When great results are a warning …

This season, Google Search and Shopping Ads are expected to surge past $70 billion in holiday spending. But there’s a hidden flaw in the auction system — one most advertisers don’t realize is costing them money even when competitors aren’t in the game. BrandPilot calls this the Uncontested Google Ads Problem, and it’s becoming one of the most overlooked sources of wasted ad spend in peak retail season. During SMX Next, John Beresford, Chief Revenue Officer at BrandPilot, unpacked how a little-known behavioral quirk in Google’s auction logic can cause advertisers to overspend on their own brand terms, their Shopping placements, and even their category keywords — si…