SEO Tools and Resources

Sam Altman’s once said advertising was a “last resort” for ChatGPT. Now he seems to think that “maybe ads don’t always suck.” What Altman is saying. In a new Stratechery interview, Altman admitted Instagram changed his mind about ads: “I love Instagram ads, they’ve added value to me, I found stuff I never would’ve found, I bought a bunch of stuff, I actively like Instagram ads. I think there’s many things I respect about Meta, but getting that so right was a surprisingly cool thing for me. Other than that, I viewed ads on the Internet as sort of like a tax.” “I believe there probably is some cool ad product we can do that is a net win to the user and a sort of…

Google made a handful of tweaks to its Channel Performance and Asset reports this week – including long-awaited ROI metrics like ROAS and CPA. But the most revealing update wasn’t in the announcement at all. A new, currently non-functional attribute called Campaign Type appeared in the Channel Performance report. Why we care. This addition — though inactive — signals that Google may soon expand the Channel Performance report beyond Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. The intrigue. For weeks, a tooltip in the interface has read: “Channel performance data is only available for Performance Max campaigns at this time.” That phrasing hinted expansion was coming. …

Google’s AI-powered Try On feature, which lets users see how clothing items look on them, is adding shoes and expanding to Australia, Canada, and Japan. How it works. The AI uses advanced shape and depth perception to show how items – now including sneakers and heels – fit your body. Users upload a full-length photo, tap “try it on,” and see themselves in the item in seconds. Why we care. For advertisers, this opens up a new frontier in online shopping. Brands can showcase products in a way that feels personalized and interactive, increasing engagement and the likelihood of conversions. Try On data also provides insights into which styles are popular and …

AI is changing the digital landscape as we know it. An industry that used to run on Google’s 10 blue links is now rapidly transitioning to digital experiences based on personalized prompts and direct answers from AI. Success is expanding beyond tracking rankings, keywords, and organic traffic. To drive future growth, brands need to prioritize visibility and authority across all search experiences and optimize to improve mentions and citations within AI responses. Which begs the question: How do brands measure and maximize their visibility in AI? Let’s dive in. What is AI visibility? AI visibility refers to how often and effectively your brand, products, or…

If you’re still calling it Apple Search Ads, you’re already behind. Earlier this year, Apple dropped the “Search” and rebranded to simply Apple Ads – a move that signals something bigger than a name change. The platform is evolving beyond App Store search, and with that shift, the rules have changed. Tactics that once drove installs and strong ROAS can now drag down performance and waste spend. The upside: for advertisers who adapt, Apple Ads is fast becoming one of the most reliable paid growth engines on iOS. Here’s what’s driving results heading into 2026. Apple Ads’ quiet advantage in the privacy era In the post-ATT world – Apple’s App T…

A dominant share – 86% to be specific – of AI citations come from sources brands already control, according to a new analysis of 6.8 million citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity conducted by brand visibility platform Yext. Why we care. The findings challenge the perception that forums like Reddit dominate AI answers. Yext’s analysis also suggests that brands can directly influence visibility in generative results by keeping website content accurate, structured, and crawlable. (Yes, SEO.) By the numbers. Across all industries, 86% of AI citations came from sources brands owned or managed. Websites lead: 44% of citations came from first-party sites.…

For years, SEO success was measured by charts pointing up and to the right. We celebrated traffic spikes, shared screenshots, and treated rising sessions as proof of strategy. But those days are gone. The Great Decoupling represents the decline of informational traffic The SEO playbook that was glorified for the last 10 years prioritized generating useless hordes of informational traffic. Marketing teams and agencies alike bamboozled executives by pumping up traffic numbers to obscene levels. People on LinkedIn celebrated programmatic SEO case studies and “SEO heists” that racked up irrelevant clicks – encouraging copycat behavior that ultimately …

The MCP Server for Google Ads is now publicly available on GitHub, Google announced. This marks a major milestone in bringing AI agents closer to real-world marketing workflows. How it works. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that allows large language models to interact with external applications through natural language. The initial version of the MCP Server is read-only, designed for diagnostics and analytics. Developers can integrate it into any MCP-compatible AI system to retrieve insights from Google Ads accounts securely. Why we care. The release of the open-source Google Ads API Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server makes it easier…

Adding fake publication dates to online content can dramatically boost its visibility across leading AI models, a team from Waseda University discovered. This seems to confirm that tools like ChatGPT systematically favor newer content over older, equally relevant material. Why we care. AI models seem to reward timestamps more than quality. That means your older high-quality content could vanish from AI search results unless it’s regularly updated – apparently, regardless of whether those updates are substantial or artificial. How they did it. Researchers added fake publication dates to passages from standardized test collections with no other changes. Then they as…

Google Analytics now lets advertisers automatically import cost data from Meta and TikTok through new native integrations, streamlining cross-channel performance tracking. Why we care. This update gives marketers a unified view of ad spend and ROI across major platforms – without relying on manual uploads or third-party connectors – helping them better compare efficiency between Google, Meta, and TikTok campaigns. The details. The integrations automatically pull up to 24 months of historical ad cost data from Meta and TikTok. Users must delete any overlapping manual imports to avoid duplicate or inflated data, as Analytics won’t de-duplicate records between m…

YouTube today introduced a new Brand Pulse report that gives advertisers a real-time snapshot of their brand’s total presence across YouTube — from paid ads, to creator collaborations, to user-generated videos. A holistic view of brand presence. The new report taps multimodal AI to spot every brand mention on YouTube – from logos and product shots to shoutouts in audio or titles. Even a quick name-drop by a creator gets tracked to show your brand’s real reach. Metrics that connect paid and organic performance. Advertisers can now see how they stack up with metrics like Total Unique Viewers and Share of Watch Time — plus how paid ads boost organic buzz when viewers…

While online discussion obsesses over whether ChatGPT spells the end of Google, websites are losing revenue from a far more real and immediate problem: some of their most valuable pages are invisible to the systems that matter. Because while the bots have changed, the game hasn’t. Your website content needs to be crawlable. Between May 2024 and May 2025, AI crawler traffic surged by 96%, with GPTBot’s share jumping from 5% to 30%. But this growth isn’t replacing traditional search traffic. Semrush’s analysis of 260 billion rows of clickstream data showed that people who start using ChatGPT maintain their Google search habits. They’re not switching; they’re e…

Generative AI is no longer a single thing. Ask, “What is the best generative AI tool for writing PR content?” or “Is keyword targeting as impossible as spinning straw into gold?,” and each engine will take a different route from prompt to answer. For writers, editors, PR pros, and content strategists, those routes matter – every AI system has its own strengths, transparency, and expectations for how to check, edit, and cite what it produces. This article covers the top AI platforms – ChatGPT (OpenAI), Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek, and Claude (Anthropic) – and explains how they: Find and synthesize information. Source and train on data. Use…

Yoast SEO is a free WordPress SEO plugin that helps your site perform better in search engines like Google. It also gives you the tools to bring your content to the highest SEO and overall readability standards. Here, we’ll explain how our plugin helps you build the best website possible! Table of contents What Yoast SEO does SEO for your posts and pages Technical SEO for your website Learn SEO by doing SEO with Yoast A quick recap What Yoast SEO does Yoast SEO offers many tools and features to boost your SEO. Some of these features influence the SEO of your whole site, while others help you optimize individual posts and pages for search engines. At …

OpenAI has announced Instant Checkout on ChatGPT. ChatGPT acts as an intermediary agent for commerce purchases on behalf of the customer. This provides a foundation that connects people and businesses for the next era of agentic commerce. What does the buying process look like? The Instant Checkout flow keeps ChatGPT at the center of every step – from discovery to payment confirmation. After finding a product through conversations with ChatGPT, the user taps “Buy” and confirms payment and shipping. ChatGPT passes this signal, and the merchant then gathers fulfillment options. ChatGPT presents these options to the user who makes a selection.…

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) formally designated Google with strategic market status (SMS) in general search and search advertising — giving regulators new powers to shape how Google operates in these sectors. What’s included. The designation covers Google’s general search and search advertising services — including AI-powered features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode — but excludes the Gemini AI assistant and certain news and syndication products. The CMA emphasized that the designation is not a finding of wrongdoing but enables “proportionate, targeted interventions” to ensure fair treatment for consumers and competitors. Why we care. Th…

Google Ads added image quality checks to its Recommendations tab, nudging advertisers to upgrade low-performing visuals. How it works. The system now scans uploaded assets and suggests edits such as “copy and edit background color to white.” Advertisers can preview suggested changes and make quick fixes directly within the dashboard. Why we care. Image quality plays a growing role in how ads perform across surfaces like Display and Gmail – and these AI-driven tips aim to help advertisers improve engagement and delivery with cleaner, more consistent creatives. Bottom line. Advertisers who act on these image recommendations could see higher engagement and be…

On episode 327 of PPC Live The Podcast, I speak to Ayisha Yousef, a familiar face to the PPC Live audience. Known for her expertise in e-commerce and performance marketing, Ayisha shares a bold story about a major Black Friday mistake — and how she managed to recover from it. The Black Friday F-Up Setting the Scene A few years ago, Ayisha was working agency-side during Black Friday week — the most crucial time for e-commerce advertisers. She managed a team of six or seven and asked them to remove ad scheduling from top campaigns to ensure ads ran throughout the busy period. But instead of adjusting the schedule to “always on,” the team deleted the schedule e…

Google is clarifying its Misrepresentation policy for Shopping ads and free listings. The update doesn’t change enforcement but adds more examples and guidance to help advertisers comply. Enforcement clarification: Google added examples related to non-delivery and inoperable return or refund processes. These are clarifications, not new rules. Support clarification: New guidance explains best practices for maintaining compliance and provides more detail on the appeals process. Why we care. Advertisers now have clearer expectations about what counts as misrepresentation. This can help prevent policy violations, reduce account suspensions, and improve customer tr…

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…

2026 is around the corner – and the SEO space has never been this noisy. Every day brings something new. It’s easy to get stuck in panic mode, worrying you’re missing the next big thing, or to spend hours scrolling LinkedIn threads that lead nowhere. In both cases, you end up with nothing concrete – and with stakeholders still expecting clear impact. As we head into 2026, the real challenge is building a strategy with discipline – one that cuts through the noise and balances: Short-term wins that prove impact and build trust. Long-term bets that future-proof visibility. The boring but essential, business-as-usual (BAU) tasks that keep your foundati…

Are you spending hours on client reporting every month, only for your stakeholders to skim it, dismiss the numbers, or ignore your recommendations? When reports don’t drive action, you lose more than time. Budget approvals, strategic influence, and client trust are all compromised. Here are five ways to make sure your PPC report doesn’t just get read, but actually moves your audience to take action. 1. Start with your audience, not the data When building a report, it’s easy to get lost in the data – dozens of metrics, multiple platforms, endless ways to slice performance. The instinct is to ask, “What data can I show?” But that approach creates rep…

Journalists have been using the inverted pyramid writing style for ages. Using it, you put your most important information upfront. Don’t hedge. Don’t bury your key point halfway down the third paragraph. And don’t hold back; tell the complete story in the first paragraph. Even online, this writing style holds up pretty well for some types of articles. It even comes in handy now that web content is increasingly used to answer every type of question a searcher might have. Find out how! Table of contents What is the inverted pyramid? The power of paragraphs The pyramid, SEO, and AI Answering questions Summaries vs. the pyramid How to write with the inverted pyramid in…

AI hasn’t replaced traditional search – it’s expanding it, according to Robby Stein, Google’s VP of Product for Search, speaking in a new interview on Lenny’s Podcast. Google is seeing more searches than ever as people ask harder, more conversational, and more visual questions powered by AI, Stein said: “People come to search for just ridiculously wide set of things. … They want specific phone number. They want a price for something. They want to get directions. They want to find a payment web page for their taxes. Like every possible thing you can imagine. “I think the vastness of that is underappreciated by many people. And what we see is that … AI hasn’t r…

Google is globally launching a new “Sponsored results” label across desktop and mobile, grouping text and Shopping ads under a clearer header. The update marks one of Google’s most visible ad labeling changes in years. It allows users to hide groups of ads directly on the search results page. How it works. Text ads will now appear under a larger Sponsored results header. The same label will apply to other formats, like Shopping ads. Users can choose to hide entire groups of sponsored results for a more personalized browsing experience. Why we care. Clearer ad labeling and the option for users to hide sponsored results could influence ad visibil…