SEO Tools and Resources

Search today looks very different from what it did even a few years ago. Users are no longer browsing through SERPs to make up their own minds; instead, they are asking AI tools for conclusions, summaries, and recommendations. This shift changes how visibility is earned, how trust is formed, and how brands are evaluated during discovery. In AI-driven search, large language models interpret information, decide what matters, and present a narrative on behalf of the user. Table of contents The rise of conversational AI as a discovery layer Not all LLMs interpret brands the same way The challenge: LLM visibility is hard to measure How does Yoast AI Brand Insights help? …

The open web is the part of the internet built on open standards that anyone can use. This concept creates a democratic digital space where people can build on each other’s work without restrictions, just like how WordPress.org is built. For website owners, understanding and leveraging the open web is increasingly crucial. Especially with the rise of AI-powered systems and the general direction that online search is taking. So, let’s explore what the open web is and what it means for your website. What is the open web? The open web refers to the part of the internet built on open, shared standards that are available to everyone. It’s powered by technologies like HT…

We are excited to announce an update to our Offer schema within Yoast SEO for Shopify. This update introduces a more robust way to communicate pricing to search engines, specifically introducing sale price strikethroughs. What’s new? Previously, communicating a “sale” was often limited to showing a single price. With this update, we’ve refined how our schema handles the Offer object. You can now clearly define: The original price: The “base” price before any discounts. The sale price: The current active price the customer pays. Why this matters When search engines understand the relationship between your original and sale prices, they can bette…

Working as an office manager in my early 20s, I read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Many of its principles still hold true today, and they guided me through multiple career transitions. Success in most careers comes from our interactions with people – whether clients or coworkers. For years, those principles of human connection, combined with technical knowledge and expertise, helped digital marketers succeed. Agencies made sense of the machines for clients, and strong relationship-building allowed them to retain those clients over time. That model is now being challenged. As AI has become fully embedded in PPC platforms, the…

Marketers are spoiled for choice when it comes to great sources of content. We now have more tools (hello, ChatGPT!) and job boards than ever, making it even easier to find writers and create content. But abundance comes with a downside: a race to the bottom, where speed and cost often take priority over quality. If you’re aiming for great (not just “good”) content, some sources are better than others. This guide breaks down where to find top-tier writers and how to build a content process that doesn’t sacrifice quality for speed. Struggle 1: What qualifies as a ‘great’ content writer? Qualifying a good writer can feel a lot like qualifying a new …

Competitive research is a gold mine of insights in the world of organic discovery. Clients always love seeing insights about how they stack up against their rivals, and the insights are very easily translated into a multi-dimensional roadmap for getting traction on essential topics. If you haven’t already done this, 2026 needs to be the year when you add competitive research from answer engine optimization (AEO) (I’ll use this acronym interchangeably with AI search) into your organic strategy – and not just because your executives or clients are clamoring for it (although I’m guessing they are). This article breaks down the distinct roles of SEO and AEO competitiv…

Innovations are coming at marketers and consumers faster than before, raising the question: Are we actually ready for the agentic web? To answer that question, it’s important to unpack a few supporting ones: What’s the agentic web? How can the agentic web be used? What are the pros and cons of the agentic web? It’s important to note that this article isn’t a mandate for AI skeptics to abandon the rational questions they have about the agentic web. Nor is it intended to place any judgment on how you, as a consumer or professional, engage with the agentic web. With thoughts and feelings so divided on the agentic web, this article aims to provi…

Digital PR is about to matter more than ever. Not because it’s fashionable, or because agencies have rebranded link building with a shinier label, but because the mechanics of search and discovery are changing. Brand mentions, earned media, and the wider PR ecosystem are now shaping how both search engines and large language models understand brands. That shift has serious implications for how SEO professionals should think about visibility, authority, and revenue. At the same time, informational search traffic is shrinking. Fewer people are clicking through long blog posts written to target top-of-funnel keywords. The commercial value in search is consolida…

Google spoke about its year-end report on the crawling challenges Google faced in 2025 when crawling and indexing the web for Google Search. The biggest challenges include faceted navigation and action parameters, which make up about 75% of those challenges, Gary Illyes from Google said. This was on its latest Search Off the Record podcast, published this morning. What is the issue. Crawling issues can cause your site to lag and slow, it can overload your server, and make your website unusable and inaccessible. If a robot goes off on your site and gets into some infinite loop of crawling, it can take some time for the site to recover. “Once it discovers a set of …

Microsoft has rolled out multi-turn search globally within Bing search results. Microsoft will add a Copilot search box to the bottom of the Bing search results, as you scroll down the search results page, this feature will dynamically appear. What is multi-turn search. This is when a searcher goes from the Bing search results, types in a follow up query into the Copilot search box at the bottom of the search results. Here is a screenshot of this feature: Here is a video of it in action: What Microsoft said. Jordi Ribas, CVP, Head of Search at Microsoft, posted this news on X – he said, “After shipping in the US last year, multi-turn search in Bing i…

I’ve spent over 20 years in companies where SEO sat in different corners of the organization – sometimes as a full-time role, other times as a consultant called in to “find what’s wrong.” Across those roles, the same pattern kept showing up. The technical fix was rarely what unlocked performance. It revealed symptoms, but it almost never explained why progress stalled. No governance The real constraints showed up earlier, long before anyone read my weekly SEO reports. They lived in reporting lines, decision rights, hiring choices, and in what teams were allowed to change without asking permission. When SEO struggled, it was usually because nobody rightfull…

As part of the v23 Ads API launch, Performance Max campaigns can now be reported by channel, including Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, Maps, and Search Partners. Previously, performance data was largely grouped into a single mixed category. The change under the hood. Earlier API versions typically returned a MIXED value for the ad_network_type segment in Performance Max campaigns. With v23, those responses now break out into specific channel enums — a meaningful shift for reporting and optimization. Why we care. Google Ads API v23 doesn’t just add features — it changes how advertisers understand Performance Max. The update introduces channel-level repor…

Search marketing is still as powerful as ever. Google recently surpassed $100 billion in ad revenue in a single quarter, with more than half coming from search. But search alone can no longer deliver the same results most businesses expect. As Google Ads Coach Jyll Saskin Gales showed at SMX Next, real performance now comes from going beyond traditional search and using it to strengthen a broader PPC strategy. The challenge with traditional Search Marketing As search marketers, we’re great at reaching people who are actively searching for what we sell. But we often miss people who fit our ideal audience and aren’t searching yet. The real opportunity sits at…

People inspecting ChatGPT responses are spotting references to ads in the page source. One line reads: “InReply to user query using the following additional context of ads shown to the user.” The reference appears even when no ad is actually displayed. Driving the news. Digital Marketer Glenn Gabe first flagged the issue on X after noticing the ad-related language in ChatGPT’s source code. Others have since replicated it while testing commercial queries like auto insurance. Why we care. Ads in ChatGPT have been talked about for weeks. This piece of code spotted signals that ChatGPT ads are moving from concept to near-launch, creating a new, high-intent adverti…

SEO has historically been an exercise in reverse-engineering algorithms. Keywords, links, technical compliance, repeat. But that model is being reimagined. Today, visibility is earned through trust, usefulness, and experience, not just relevance signals or crawlability. Search engines no longer evaluate pages in isolation. They observe how people interact with brands over time. That shift has given rise to human experience optimization (HXO): the practice of optimizing how humans experience, trust, and act on your brand across search, content, product, and conversion touchpoints. Rather than replacing SEO, HXO expands its scope to reflect how search …

Natural language is quickly becoming the default way people interact with online tools. Instead of typing a few keywords, users now ask full questions, give detailed instructions, and are starting to expect clear, conversational answers. So, how can you make sure your content provides the answer to their question? Or better yet, how can you make it possible for them to interact with your website in a similar way? That’s where Microsoft’s NLWeb comes in. Meet NLWeb, Microsoft’s new open project NLWeb, short for Natural Language Web, is an open project recently launched by Microsoft. The aim of this project is to bring conversational interfaces directly to websites,…

Ads are now being tested in ChatGPT in the U.S., appearing for some users across different account types. For the first time, advertising is entering an AI answer environment – and that changes the rules for marketers. We’ve used AI as part of ad creation or planning for years across Google, LinkedIn, and paid social. But placing ads inside an AI system that people trust to help them think, decide, and act is fundamentally different. This is not just another channel to plug into an existing media plan. The biggest question is not targeting. It’s psychology. If advertisers simply replicate what works in search or social, performance will disappoint, and trust may s…

Custom GPTs can help SEO teams move faster by turning repeatable tasks into structured workflows. If you don’t have access to paid ChatGPT, you can still use these prompts as standalone references by copying them into your notes for future reuse. You will need to tweak them for your team’s specific use cases, because they are intended as a starting point. Working with AI is largely trial and error. To get better at writing prompts, practice with small tasks first, iterate on prompts, and take notes on what gets you good outputs. AI also tends to ramble, so it helps to give strict guidelines for formatting and to specify what not to do. You can upload resource…

Many search teams are seeing better rankings, more visibility, increased traffic, and more leads. Yet feedback on pipeline, revenue, and sales outcomes isn’t showing the same positive results. When SEO KPIs are green and graphs are up and to the right, business outcomes don’t always reflect the same success. Why strong search performance doesn’t translate to business outcomes Search performance can look healthy on the surface while breaking down in places search teams don’t own or fully see. It’s tempting to turn immediately to attribution models, data quality, or KPI definitions. Ultimately, the issue is often how performance breaks down after th…

Google has released v23 of the Google Ads API, the first update of 2026 and the start of a faster release cadence, introducing deeper Performance Max reporting, more granular invoicing, new AI-powered audience tools, and expanded campaign controls. What’s new: Performance Max transparency: Ad network type breakdowns are now available for PMax campaigns. More detailed invoices: Campaign-level costs, regulatory fees, and adjustments can be retrieved via InvoiceService. More precise scheduling: Campaigns can now use start and end date-times instead of date-only fields. Local data access: Store location details are available through PerStoreView, matching th…

Google announced yesterday that it is exploring ways for sites to opt out of Google using their content for its AI-generative search features, such as AI Mode and AI Overviews. I asked the SEO community on X if they would opt out of these Google Search AI-generative features or not. The results. Of the over 350 responses that took the poll yesterday, most said they would not opt out. However, about 1/3 of respondents said they would block or opt out of these features. Here is the breakdown: Question: Would you block Google from using your content for AI Overviews and AI Mode? 33.2% – Yes, I’d block Google 41.9% – No, I wouldn’t block 24.9% – I am not s…

One of the biggest SEO challenges right now isn’t AI. It’s the irresponsible misinformation surrounding it. SEO isn’t dying — it’s evolving. That means it’s on us to understand how the industry is changing, and to be careful about who we listen to. I’m not easily shocked, but some of the AEO (or GEO) talks I’ve seen over the past year have been genuinely eyebrow-raising — even for someone with Botox. I still remember one speaker telling a room full of marketers they were “sorry for anyone still working in SEO,” then immediately recommending outdated tactics as the “secret sauce” for LLM visibility. It’s been… painful. Thankfully, the adults have entered …

For a long time, SEO had the simplest math in marketing: Rank higher → Get more traffic → Fill the sales pipeline To the dissatisfaction of marketing executives, that linear world is breaking fast. Between AI Overviews, zero-click SERPs, and users getting answers directly from LLMs, the old “rank to get traffic and leads” equation is failing. Today, holding a top keyword position often yields significantly fewer clicks than it did just two years ago. This has forced many uncomfortable conversations in boardrooms. CMOs and CEOs are looking at traffic dashboards and asking tough questions, especially: “If traffic is down… how do we know SEO is act…

Google is experimenting with showing third-party endorsement content directly within Search ads. The test places short endorsements from external publishers under the ad description, including the third party’s name, logo, and favicon. What’s showing up. The test was first spotted by Sarah Blocksidge, Marketing Director at Sixth City Marketing, who shared a screenshot on Mastodon. In the example, a Search ad included the line “Best for Frequent Travelers,” attributed to PCMag, complete with the publication’s favicon. The endorsement appears directly beneath the ad copy, visually separating it from standard advertiser-written text. Why we care. If rolle…

For years, conversations about paid media have revolved around one question: should companies build in-house teams or outsource to agencies? That debate makes sense, but it misses the real issue. The problem isn’t where paid media sits in the org chart. It’s how performance leadership is structured. Many companies run Google Ads and other paid channels with capable teams, solid budgets, and documented best practices. Campaigns are live. Dashboards are full. Optimizations happen on schedule. Yet: Results stall. Pipelines flatten. Budgets get questioned. Confidence in paid advertising erodes. This is rarely a talent issue. It’s usually a structu…