SEO Tools and Resources

SEO never stands still, and neither do we here at Yoast. In our November 2025 edition of the SEO Update by Yoast, our principal SEOs, Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, broke down the latest shifts in search, structured data, and AI. Whether you’re running an e-commerce store, managing a content-heavy site, or just keeping up with Google’s ever-changing rules, this edition highlights what actually matters. Google updates Google is refining its search results, phasing out certain structured data features, including FAQ snippets and COVID-19 updates. But that doesn’t mean you should strip structured data from your site. It still plays a role behind the scenes, especiall…

Google is now powering some of the responses you see in the AI Overviews and AI Mode using Gemini 3. We expected this to happen when Google announced Gemini 3 last week, and now it is live for some searchers in Google Search. Nick Fox, Google’s SVP of Knowledge and Information, wrote on X: “The rollout of Gemini 3 in Search continues! We’ve just shipped intelligent automatic model routing to Gemini 3 Pro for your toughest questions in AI Overviews and AI Mode.” Who sees it. “Currently available for Google AI Pro & Ultra subs in the U.S.,” Nick Fox added. You will know if you have it, if you have an option to select it from the carrot menu in the AI Mode…

Google Ads’ new AI image tool, Nano Banana Pro (NB), brings conversational image generation and editing directly into campaigns, letting advertisers create seasonal, mood-adjusted, and material-specific visuals without a photoshoot. It’s part of Google’s broader push alongside Opal, its AI writing tool, to accelerate content creation across PMax, Display, and other automated campaigns. Driving the news. Ameet Khabra, founder of Hop Skip Media, ran extensive tests across three industries—mattresses, HVAC, and real estate—to evaluate NB’s performance in live campaign scenarios. She found that while the tool shows impressive results in some areas, it has notable limitati…

Google Ads is giving advertisers more flexibility with the Overview tab, allowing up to five custom views. This lets marketers tailor their dashboards to track the metrics that matter most to their campaigns. Driving the news. The update was spotted and shared screenshots on LinkedIn, highlighting that users can now add multiple tabs and fully customize Overview pages for their unique needs. What’s changing. Previously, the Overview tab had a fixed layout, limiting how agencies and advertisers could monitor performance. With custom views, teams can now organize metrics, charts, and reports in a way that aligns with their workflow, improving efficiency and …

Google is quietly updating its Personalized Ads policy on Dec. 12, expanding access to Custom Segments for certain Display campaigns — a shift that could unlock new targeting options for advertisers previously restricted under the policy. Driving the news. Advertisers received a brief, mandatory service email from Google announcing the change but offering no details beyond the policy update. The key clarification: this update applies specifically to campaigns limited by the Personalized Ads policy, not to all Display campaigns. The confusion: Google Ads Coach Jyll Saskin Gales noted that Custom Segments have already been available for most Display campaigns by …

You might think you’ve mastered the Google Ads search terms report, but this essential optimization tool is still widely misunderstood – and often misused. Here are five tips to help you get more from your campaigns by using the search terms report the right way. Keywords vs. Search Terms: A quick refresh When discussing keywords and search terms, it’s easy to confuse the terminology. Here’s a simple breakdown: Keyword: The term you add to a Search campaign – along with a match type – to tell Google which kinds of searches you want your ads to appear for. Search term: The actual phrase a real person typed into Google that triggered your ad. Your ad…

Ranking No. 1 is still an accomplishment, but by now, most SEO professionals understand that it doesn’t mean what it once did. Search in 2026 is messy, multi-surface, and sometimes more passive than active: AI: AI Overviews and answer engines. Social: YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest as search platforms. Forums and UGC: Reddit, Quora, and UGC blended straight into results. SERP features: People Also Ask, What People Are Saying, etc. Jim Yu, Founder and CEO of BrightEdge, shared with me: “In the early days of search, success was simple: earn rankings, get clicks, grow traffic. But search has evolved through quick answers, featured snippets, maps, …

Publishers and search engines have long depended on ad placements and affiliate marketing to make money. Search engines rely on pay-per-click (PPC) models, while publishers blend display ads, affiliate links, and sponsored content. But with chat-based AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity on the rise, that foundation is starting to crack. If users get the information they need directly from AI, why would they keep clicking search ads or publisher display links? And as search engines push further into AI-driven results – including features like Google’s AI Mode – what incentive remains for users to engage with traditional ad units? If fewer…

Food bloggers say this Thanksgiving is a breaking point. Google Search and AI Overviews, powered by Gemini 3, are rewriting recipes, stealing clicks, and in some cases serving dangerously wrong cooking instructions, Bloomberg reported. Why we care. For more than a decade, food bloggers could predict and rely on holiday traffic. Not this year. AI answers are replacing vetted recipes, cutting off creators’ main revenue streams, and confusing home cooks with stitched-together instructions that don’t always make sense. What’s happening. Google’s AI Overviews now surface blended cooking steps from multiple bloggers, often above the links/sources they draw from. Ma…

For years, marketers measured digital success through impressions, backlinks and clicks. If you ranked high in search results and won the click, you had visibility and control of the funnel. But that landscape is already shifting. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are rapidly becoming the first place decision-makers go for answers. These systems don’t return a page of links; they generate a synthesized response. Whether your brand is included, or ignored, in that answer increasingly determines your relevance in the buying journey. This changes the marketer’s playbook. Visibility is no longer only about ranking on Google. It’s…

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…

A surge of sophisticated phishing attacks is letting scammers take over full Google Ads Manager accounts (MCCs), giving them instant access to hundreds of client accounts and the power to burn through tens of thousands of dollars in hours without being noticed. Driving the news. Agencies across LinkedIn, Reddit, and Google’s own forums are reporting a rise in MCC takeovers, even among teams using two-factor authentication. The attackers’ preferred weapon is a near-perfect phishing email that mimics Google’s account-access invitations. Victims say hijackers add fake admin users, link their own MCCs, and begin launching fraudulent, high-budget campaigns. In some…

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…

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…

Black Friday is peak retail season, yet many brands still lose money on Google Shopping ads for products they’ve already sold out of. The problem. Ads continue to run after items go out of stock, triggering cost-per-click charges with little to no chance of conversion. In a ShoppingIQ study of 500 global retailers, 97% continued to pay for clicks on unavailable products, often for 24 to 48 hours. Why we care. Out-of-stock ads waste budget, distort campaign performance, and confuse algorithmic learning. When clicks lead to dead ends, conversion rates drop, rankings slip, ROI falls, and future bidding becomes less efficient. Example. Argos reportedly continued t…

A three-year analysis of up to 6,000 advertisers shows that using Google’s seasonality bid adjustments during Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) consistently harms efficiency — even though the platforms keep recommending them. The big picture. Smart Bidding’s models are designed to anticipate predictable retail spikes. Optmyzr’s analysis of tens of billions of impressions across 2022–2024 found that advertisers who skipped seasonality adjustments consistently performed better on efficiency metrics. Without adjustments, Smart Bidding: Identified the BFCM conversion lift on its own Raised bids rationally Kept ROAS stable — even improving it in 2024 …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…