SEO Tools and Resources

Generative AI has become a practical tool in search, content, and analytical workflows. But, as adoption increases, so does a familiar and costly problem: confidently incorrect outputs. Also called “hallucinations,” the term implies that an AI model is malfunctioning. But here’s the truth: This behavior is often predictable and results from unclear instructions. Or, more accurately, unclear prompts. For example, prompt AI for a “cookie recipe,” and nothing more. Don’t offer details about allergies, preferences, or constraints. The result might be Christmas cookies in July, a peanut-packed option, or a recipe so bland and basic as to be unworthy of t…

TikTok has created a new U.S.-based joint venture designed to comply with federal national security requirements and keep the app operating for more than 200 million Americans. The new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, was formally established under an executive order signed by President The President on Sept. 25, 2025, according to an announcement released today. The big picture. TikTok USDS Joint Venture is majority American-owned and operates as an independent entity with responsibility for U.S. user data, content moderation, and algorithm security. ByteDance retains a 19.9% stake, below the threshold often cited by U.S. officials as a national security co…

A new bug in Google Ads is preventing some advertisers from editing and saving existing Performance Max (PMAX) asset groups. Users report seeing error messages when attempting to make changes in the platform interface, blocking updates from being saved. Why we care. Performance Max relies heavily on asset freshness and iteration. If advertisers can’t update asset groups, campaigns risk running with outdated creative, messaging, or offers — directly impacting performance and efficiency. What advertisers are seeing. Affected users encounter an error message reading, “An error occurred. Please try again later. Value is required,” when attempting to edit asset grou…

Some Google Ads advertisers are seeing a bug that causes the option to add notes to disappear from the account change popup, making it harder to document optimizations and performance shifts. The issue was flagged by paid search consultant Odi Caspi, who says the problem has appeared intermittently over the past couple of weeks. What advertisers should be seeing: Caspi shares his view below: Why we care. Account notes are a key workflow tool for agencies and in-house teams tracking changes over time. Losing easy access to notes makes troubleshooting performance swings harder and weakens institutional memory across teams. What users are seeing. …

On episode 338 of PPC Live The Podcast, I speak to Nick Handley Paid Media Lead at Impression, about one of the most formative mistakes of his career — and why those early errors often shape the strongest marketers. The podcast series focuses on PPC professionals’ biggest “F-ups,” but never without exploring how they recovered, who helped them, and what lasting lessons came out the other side. Nick’s story is a textbook example of how a single mistake can permanently change how you work — for the better. The Black Friday mistake that took everything down Nick takes listeners back nearly ten years, to the very start of his career at Tyres on the Drive (now owned…

Apple is expanding ads in App Store search results, giving advertisers more opportunities to reach users at the moment they’re looking to download apps. Starting March 3rd, Apple Ads will begin showing additional ads per search query in the UK, followed by Japan. The expansion is expected to roll out to all Apple Ads markets by the end of March. Why we care. More ad slots in App Store search results mean more chances to win installs—but also more competition for the same high-intent queries, which could push up costs. With no ability to choose placements, performance may vary by position, making creative relevance, keyword strategy, and conversion tracking more…

Throughout 2025, SEO professionals reported the same story to leadership: organic traffic was down, clicks were declining, and attribution no longer made sense. AI-driven search experiences, zero-click results, and platform-level answers widened the gap between discovery and measurable visits, making it harder than ever to accurately report on organic performance. For many organizations, this showed up as double-digit, year-over-year declines in reported organic traffic and leads. The C-suite asked the obvious questions: Why are clicks down? Why does organic traffic look 25% lower than last year? Is SEO actually hurting the business? The problem wasn’t t…

Google doesn’t build products with B2B marketers in mind. Its largest budgets and transaction volume come from DTC and B2C brands, so that’s where product development naturally starts. That’s why new Google products rarely work for B2B out of the gate. Over my 15+ years in advertising, I’ve seen this pattern repeat: initial release, poor B2B fit, then gradual improvement after about two years. We saw it with responsive search ads, broad match (yes, I thought it was the end of times, too), and dynamic search ads. Performance Max follows the same trajectory. Three years ago, I would have said “absolutely not” for B2B organizations. In 2026, that a…

Google Ads is rolling out a new Experiment Center, giving advertisers a single place to test, measure, and compare campaign performance. What’s new. Google has launched a new help page introducing the Experiment Center, a unified dashboard that brings together traditional Experiments and Lift Studies under one roof. Advertisers can now manage tests around bidding, targeting, and creatives alongside studies measuring brand, search, or conversion lift. Why we care. Experimentation in Google Ads has historically been fragmented, with A/B tests and lift studies living in different places. A centralized hub lowers friction and makes it easier for advertisers to validat…

As AI-driven bidding and automation transform paid media, first-party data has become the most powerful lever advertisers control. In this conversation with Search Engine Land, Julie Warneke, founder and CEO of Found Search Marketing, explained why first-party data now underpins profitable advertising — no matter how Google’s position on third-party cookies evolves. What first-party data really is — and isn’t First-party data is customer information that an advertiser owns directly, usually housed in a CRM. It includes: Lead details. Purchase history. Revenue. Customer value collected through websites, forms, or physical locations. It doesn’…

Performance Max has come a long way since its rocky launch. Many advertisers once dismissed it as a half-baked product, but Google has spent the past 18 months fixing real issues around transparency and control. If you wrote Performance Max off before, it’s time to take another look. Mike Ryan, head of ecommerce insights at Smarter Ecommerce, explained why at the latest SMX Next. Taking a fresh look at Performance Max Performance Max traces its roots to Smart Shopping campaigns, which Google rolled out with red carpet fanfare at Google Marketing Live in 2019. Even then, industry experts warned that transparency and control would become serious issues. The…

Traditional ranking performance no longer guarantees that content can be surfaced or reused by AI systems. A page can rank well, satisfy search intent, and follow established SEO best practices, yet still fail to appear in AI-generated answers or citations. In most cases, the issue isn’t content quality. It’s that the information can’t reliably be extracted once it’s parsed, segmented, and embedded by AI retrieval systems. This is an increasingly common challenge in AI search. Search engines evaluate pages as complete documents and can compensate for structural ambiguity through link context, historical performance, and other ranking signals. AI systems don’…

PR measurement often breaks down in practice. Limited budgets, no dedicated analytics staff, siloed teams, and competing priorities make it difficult to connect media outreach to real outcomes. That’s where collaboration with SEO, PPC, and digital marketing teams becomes essential. Working together, these teams can help PR do three things that are hard to accomplish alone: Show the connection between media outreach and customer action. Incorporate SEO – and now generative engine optimization (GEO) – into measurement programs. Select tools that match the metrics that actually matter. This article lays out a practical way to do exactly that, witho…

There’s a dangerous misconception in B2B marketing that video is just a “brand awareness” play. We tend to bucket video into two extremes: The “viral” top-of-funnel asset that gets views but no leads. The dry bottom-of-funnel product demo that gets leads but no views. This binary thinking is breaking your pipeline. In my role at LinkedIn, I have access to a unique view of the B2B buying ecosystem. What the data shows is that the most successful companies don’t treat video as a tactic for one stage of the funnel. They treat it as a multiplier. When you integrate video strategy across the entire buying journey – connecting brand to demand – effectivene…

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…

For many local businesses, performance looks healthier than it is. Rank trackers still show top-three positions. Visibility reports appear steady. Yet calls and website visits from Google Business Profiles are falling — sometimes fast. This gap is becoming a defining feature of local search today. Rankings are holding. Visibility and performance aren’t. The alligator has arrived in local SEO. The visibility crisis behind stable rankings Across multiple U.S. industries, traditional local 3-packs are being replaced — or at least supplemented — by AI-powered local packs. These layouts behave differently from the map results we’ve optimized in the past.…

Google has released the February 2026 Discover core update, this is a core update specific to how Google surfaces content within Google Discover. Google wrote, “This is a broad update to our systems that surface articles in Discover.” This is first rolling out to English language users in the US, and will expand it to all countries and languages in the months ahead, Google said. What is expected. Google said the Discover update will improve the Google Discover “experience in a few key ways,” including: Showing users more locally relevant content from websites based in their country Reducing sensational content and clickbait in Discover Showing more i…

Most PPC teams still build campaigns the same way: pull a keyword list, set match types, and organize ad groups around search terms. It’s muscle memory. But Google’s auction no longer works that way. Search now behaves more like a conversation than a lookup. In AI Mode, users ask follow-up questions and refine what they’re trying to solve. AI Overviews reason through an answer first, then determine which ads support that answer. In Google Ads, the auction isn’t triggered by a keyword anymore – it’s triggered by inferred intent. If you’re still structuring campaigns around exact and phrase match, you’re planning for a system that no longer exists. The new f…

Google Search is entering an “expansionary moment” driven by longer queries, more follow-up questions, and growing use of voice and images. That’s according to Alphabet’s executives who spoke on last night’s Q4 earnings call. In other words: Google Search is evolving into AI-driven experiences where conversations increasingly happen inside Google’s own interfaces. Why we care. AI in Google Search is no longer an experiment. It is a structural change that is altering user behavior and is reshaping discovery, visibility, and traffic across the web. By the numbers. Alphabet’s Q4 advertising revenue totaled $82.284 billion, up 13.5% from $72.461 billion 2024: …

AI is no longer an experimental layer in search. It’s actively mediating how customers discover, evaluate, and choose local businesses, increasingly without a traditional search interaction. The real risk is data stagnation. As AI systems act on local data for users, brands that fail to adapt risk declining visibility, data inconsistencies, and loss of control over how locations are represented across AI surfaces. Learn how AI is changing local search and what you can do to stay visible in this new landscape. How AI search is different from traditional search We are experiencing a platform shift where machine inference, not database retrieval, drives d…

Right now, it’s hard to find a marketing conversation that doesn’t include two letters: AI. SEOs, strategists, and marketing leaders everywhere are asking the same question in different ways: How do we use AI to cut manpower, streamline work, move faster, and boost efficiency? Much of that thinking makes sense. If you run a business, you can’t ignore a tool that turns hours of grunt work into minutes. You’d be foolish to try. But we’re spending too much time asking, “Can AI do this?” and not enough time asking, “Should AI do this?” Once the initial excitement fades, some uncomfortable questions show up. If every title tag, meta description, land…

One of the biggest reasons new advertisers end up in underperforming Performance Max campaigns is simple: they followed Google’s advice. Google Ads reps are often well-meaning and, in many cases, genuinely helpful at a surface level. But it’s critical for advertisers – especially new ones – to understand who those reps work for, how they’re incentivized, and what their recommendations are actually optimized for. Before defaulting to Google’s newest recommendation, it’s worth taking a step back to understand why the “shiny new toy” isn’t always the right move – and how advertisers can better advocate for strategies that serve their business, not just the platf…

AI search hasn’t killed SEO. Now you have to win twice: the ranking and the citation. Google searches for almost anything today, and there’s a good chance you’ll see an AI Overview before the organic results, sometimes even before the ads. That summary frames the query, shortlists sources, and shapes which brands get considered. AI Overviews now appear for about 21% of all keywords, according to Ahrefs. And 99.9% are triggered by informational intent. Search rankings still matter. But AI summaries increasingly determine who wins early consideration. Here’s what we’re seeing: brands aren’t losing visibility because they dropped from position thr…

Google has updated two of its help documents to explain the limits of Googlebot when it crawls. Specifically, how much Googlebot can consume by filetype and format. The limits. The limits, some of which were documented already and are not new, include: 15MB for web pages: Google wrote, “By default, Google’s crawlers and fetchers only crawl the first 15MB of a file.” 64MB for PDF files: Google wrote, “When crawling for Google Search, Googlebot crawls the first 2MB of a supported file type, and the first 64MB of a PDF file.” 2MB for supported files types: Google wrote, “When crawling for Google Search, Googlebot crawls the first 2MB of a supported file type,…

Google may finally be starting to address a popular SEO and AI visibility “tactic”: self-promotional “best of” listicles. That’s according to new research by Lily Ray, vice president, SEO strategy and research at Amsive. Across several SaaS brands hit hard in January, a pattern emerged. Many relied heavily on review-style content that ranked their own product as the No. 1 “best” in its category, often updated with the current year to trigger recency signals. What’s happening. After the December 2025 core update, Google search results showed increased volatility throughout January, according to Barry Schwartz. Google hasn’t announced or confirmed any updates this y…