SEO Tools and Resources

Google is piloting Brand Profiles in Merchant Center Next, giving retailers a fresh way to showcase their story, values, and promotions directly in Search results. Why we care. With shopping searches increasingly crowded, Brand Profiles give merchants a chance to differentiate beyond product listings, potentially influencing purchase decisions earlier in the journey. How it works: Appears in the Merchant Center Next “Brand” section, though currently locked from editing. Lets merchants highlight brand values, categories, and business descriptions. Supports images, videos, and offers to enrich product visibility. Provides insights into how customers in…

After months of merchant frustration over securing the required API key for website-reported local inventory feeds via Google Tag Manager, Google has now confirmed a straightforward process: Complete setup. Request validation through a form. Once approved, a Google agent provides the API key. Why we care. This clarification makes it easier for merchants to implement local inventory feeds, stay compliant with Google’s policies, and bring in-store availability data into their Shopping presence faster. What’s next. With this streamlined process, merchants can expect smoother onboarding and more reliable integration of local inventory into their campaigns.…

Google today rolled out Search Live in the U.S. Before today, Search Live was in Google Labs as an opt-in feature. Search Live, built into the Google app, lets people talk directly with Google Search in real time. Users can share their phone camera feed so Search can “see” what they’re looking at. How it works. Tap the Live icon in the Google app (Android, iOS). Ask questions. Optionally turn on the camera so Search can interpret what’s in front of you. Search responds with answers, context, and cites its sources at the bottom. What’s new: Unlike earlier testing in Labs, the full release includes both voice and camera input. Google demoed this …

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…

TikTok has moved well beyond its roots as a short-form video app. It now serves as a search destination where people turn for answers, ideas, and products. Creator Search Insights gives creators and brands a window into that behavior – highlighting trending queries, underserved topics, and real audience interests. And the data backs up this shift: two-thirds of U.S. consumers use at least one social network for search, nearly half use several, and four of the top seven search platforms – YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok – are social. What TikTok’s Creator Search Insights can do for you TikTok’s Creator Search Insights tool gives creators visi…

My experience has shown one simple truth: clients stay or go based not on results alone, but on the service they receive. This holds true for the vast majority of clients we’ve worked with. You can deliver excellent outcomes, but if clients feel underserved, they’re likely to leave. Clients aren’t always rational, and that’s exactly why every touchpoint matters – especially reporting. Reporting is often your main connection with clients and can define how they perceive your service. That makes it one of the most important parts of your business. So, what makes a great report? This article tackles the key principles of building reports that …

Google will update its Misrepresentation policy specific to the Dishonest Pricing Practices. Specifically, this will require advertisers to disclose the payment model or full expense that a user will incur before and after purchase, and clarify any false or misleading impressions of the cost of a product or service. What is changing. Google will update the policy specific to these changes: Advertisers must clearly and conspicuously disclose the payment model or full expense that a user will bear before and after purchase. Pricing practices that create a false or misleading impression of the cost of a product or service, leading to inflated or unexpected charge…

OpenAI is hiring a Growth Paid Marketing Platform Engineer to help develop tools for ad platform integration, campaign management, and real-time attribution. The role is part of a new ChatGPT growth team tasked with building the backbone of OpenAI’s in-house paid marketing platform. Why we care. OpenAI wants to monetize free users via ChatGPT ads by 2026, according to reports. It seems that OpenAI is now starting to build that ad-buying infrastructure so brands can run campaigns on ChatGPT. That would give advertisers access to a new platform with massive reach (700 million weekly users as of August). The details. The listing calls for building APIs, data pi…

Google Ads can now surface a recommendation to link your unlinked Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account. The neat part is that the linking of your Google Ads and analytics account can be done with a single click. How it works. Google will show this as a recommendation in the Recommendations section of the Campaigns page in the Google Ads console for eligible users. All you need to do is review the recommendation and click “Apply.” What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of the recommendation: Why we care. Google said advertisers “who link their Google Ads or Google Marketing Platform accounts to a Google Analytics property are correlated …

For a decade, marketing strategy was engineered to master Google’s “messy middle.” Today, the customer’s exploration and evaluation journey has migrated from the open web (PPC, Reddit, YouTube, websites) into closed AI environments (ChatGPT, AI Mode, Perplexity), making direct observation impossible. Your marketing analytics stack faces funnel blindness. You must reconstruct customer journeys from fragmented data offered by LLM visibility tools. Funnel reconstruction relies on two primary data streams The rush to measure LLM performance has vendors promising dashboards to help you “Analyze your AI visibility right now.” This work requires reconciling two f…

Many still treat E-E-A-T as a box to tick in an SEO audit. But it’s more than that – it’s how search engines and AI systems decide which content to trust. The paradox? Global brands that dominate in one country often underperform in others. Without clear local trust and authority signals, even the strongest global reputation may not carry across borders. Why E-E-A-T breaks down across borders When Google or an LLM compares multiple content options, it must choose which is the most complete, accurate, and trustworthy. That decision once leaned heavily on backlinks. Now, advanced algorithms consider a richer mix – authorship, structured d…

Content has long been the fuel for SEO, and its importance continues as AI-driven search relies on rich, trustworthy information. I’ve always believed in doing the “good” and “right” things when it comes to creating content at scale – but even good things can become problems when overdone. Too often, SEO and AI visibility efforts get reduced to publishing more blogs, landing pages, or articles in the pursuit of quick wins that executives want to see. While content is critical, treating SEO as a production machine creates the illusion of progress. Activity without performance bloats sites with duplicative, commoditized, or low-value pages that both search…

ChatGPT now processes 66 million “search-like” prompts per day, while Google still processes about 14 billion searches daily – roughly 210 times more. That’s the latest AI search reality check, via Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SparkToro. By the numbers. Google processes ~210x more searches than ChatGPT. Even DuckDuckGo outpaces ChatGPT in referrals, per estimates. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said ChatGPT handled 1 billion prompts per day in December. By July, that number was 2.5 billion prompts. Much of that growth comes from API calls (businesses plugging GPT into products). A Harvard/OpenAI study found 21.3% of prompts are “search-like.” That’s roughly …

President Donald The President signed an executive order approving a proposed $14 billion deal to keep TikTok operating in the U.S., with a new joint-venture company overseeing its U.S. business. ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based parent, would retain under 20% ownership if China signs off. Why we care. This deal ends a years-long national security fight that nearly got TikTok banned in the U.S., where it has more than 150 million users. For advertisers, that means continued access to one of the fastest-growing platforms for reaching younger audiences. But political and regulatory uncertainty still hangs over TikTok, leaving questions about ad budgets and brand safety. …

Google Ads will change how automatically created customer conversion goals are set as account-default starting Nov. 17, aiming to reduce wasted spend from campaigns optimizing toward irrelevant goals. How it works now. New conversion actions created via the API automatically generate customer conversion goals. Those goals are set as account-default by default, making them biddable across campaigns. The result: campaigns may target unnecessary goals, diluting performance. What’s changing. Under the new rules, a newly created goal will only default to account-level bidding if every other goal in that category is already account-default. Example: If an acc…

Meta is rolling out a paid option for Facebook and Instagram users in the UK to opt out of ads, marking a major shift in how its platforms operate under local regulation. Starting in the coming weeks, UK users over 18 will be offered the choice to keep using Facebook and Instagram for free with personalized ads, or subscribe to avoid them. Pricing is set at £2.99/month on the web or £3.99/month on iOS and Android for the first account, with additional accounts costing £2 or £3, respectively. Why we care. The move responds to guidance from the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), giving users more control over how their data is used while keeping adve…

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…

Every few months, Google launches a new feature – and reactions usually split into two extremes: either it’s a welcome but overdue correction or a sign of PPC end times. AI Max is no exception. Some advertisers love what it represents and how it’s delivered, while others are ready to dismiss it altogether. As with most things, the reality falls somewhere in between. Instead of speculating on what-ifs, I’ll share what I’ve seen after testing AI Max for 30+ days across multiple accounts. Google’s new AI Max feature explained AI Max is an optional toggle for your Search campaigns that opens you up to what Google calls “the full potential of Google Search.” …

Crawl waste – basically, cluttering your crawlable content with tons of non-indexed pages – is one of the most insidious SEO pitfalls. We know (because we do it all the time for my agency’s clients) that reducing the number of non-indexed pages and highlighting richer, authoritative content is a factor in improving rankings and visibility in traditional SERP listings. But how does it impact AI search visibility? And were the results different by platform? Thanks to some recent cleanup and data-crunching (we used Profound to measure changes in AI search visibility) for a client in the childcare vertical, we’ve got some directional answers and takeaways that I’…

Google Search Labs has a new experiment you can opt into that turns on some Agentic capabilities within AI Mode. This allows Google to help you make a reservation at a restaurant and will soon give you the ability to book local service appointments and event tickets. Agentic capabilities in AI Mode. The new labs feature works for users in the US who are signed into their Google account. You can opt in and review the features over here. AI Mode in Google Search now has agentic capabilities to help with your everyday local needs. “We’re starting with restaurant reservations, and expanding soon to local service appointments and event tickets,” Google wrote. This…

You can now pull Pinterest cost, click, and impression data directly into Google Analytics via Pinterest Ads Data Import. Why we care. Bringing Pinterest Ads data into Analytics gives advertisers a unified view of performance across channels. But mismanaging imports can lead to duplicate or inaccurate reporting. How it works. When you set up a Pinterest Ads Data Import, Google Analytics attempts to pull up to 24 months of historical campaign data. If the Pinterest API doesn’t support that full range, Analytics will extract as much as possible. If you have previously uploaded Pinterest cost data manually, you’ll need to delete those datasets first — otherwise…

In episode 325 of PPC Live The Podcast, I sat down with Inderpaul “Indi” Rai, Group Account Director at WeDiscover, to explore the lessons learned from mistakes, team dynamics, and the evolving role of automation and AI in paid search. Indi, a veteran with over a decade of experience in AdTech, MarTech, SEO, analytics, and multilingual paid search, shared candid insights on how errors can shape careers and client relationships. Embracing Mistakes to Grow Indi opened up about one of the most significant mistakes in his career: an automated budget feature in Search Ads 360 went unchecked during his holiday, resulting in the US account overspending by a substantial am…

TikTok is introducing a new ad solution, Travel Ads powered by Smart+, designed to help brands connect with travelers during the discovery and booking phases. Why now. Travel is one of TikTok’s fastest-growing verticals. According to internal TikTok data: 66% of users say the app is their most helpful source of travel inspiration. Users are 2.6x more likely to book after searching on TikTok. How it works. Travel Ads leverage TikTok’s travel intent model and catalog integration to automatically serve personalized creatives at scale. Smart+ AI powers campaign setup, creative generation, and delivery optimization, aiming to convert discovery into bookings…

OpenAI is launching Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT to Plus, Pro, and Free users in the U.S. Users will be able to buy products from Etsy sellers. Purchases are powered by the new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed with Stripe. How it works. Users search in plain language (e.g., “gifts for a ceramics lover”). Then: ChatGPT returns product recommendations ranked by relevance, not payment. If an item supports Instant Checkout, users tap “Buy,” confirm shipping and payment details, and complete the order without leaving chat. Orders, payments, and fulfillment run through the merchant’s existing systems; ChatGPT just passes information secure…

Pinterest is rolling out Top of Search ads, a new ad format that places brands directly in the first 10 slots of search results and Related Pins, where nearly half of user clicks occur. Shopping on Pinterest is inherently visual, and most searches on the platform (96%) are unbranded according to Pinterest. That makes the top of search results a prime spot for discovery – and for brands to reach consumers who are open to new products. Why we care. Pinterest’s Top of Search ads put your products in front of shoppers at the most valuable moment: when they’re actively browsing but not yet brand-committed. With nearly all searches unbranded, the format offers a powerfu…