SEO Tools and Resources

Google said it is now able to catch 20 times the number of scammy pages within Google Search than it was previously. Google also said that it reduced the number of bad actors on the web impersonating airline customer service providers by more than 80% within Google Search. Google credits its AI and improved classifiers for these changes. The numbers. Google gave these two stats when it comes to improving the safety of the Google Search results: Google Search can “catch 20-times the number of scammy pages” Google Search has reduced fake phone number “scams by more than 80% in Search” AI and classifier improvements. Google credits these improvements to i…

Google Analytics real time reporting may be off this morning, at least based on a number of reports we are hearing about since earlier this morning. If you are noticing unusually low real-time counts in GA4, you are not alone. More details. I reported about the issue earlier today on the Search Engine Roundtable, quoting a number of complaints on social: Seeing this right now. Either the bottom just dropped out on traffic, or it's an Analytics issue. — wordmetrics (@wordmetrics) May 8, 2025 Looks like GA4 is on a coffee break today! Hope they get back to work soon. Not alone in this! — Chandan Kumar (@ImChandanKumar) May 8, 2025 Again real time numbers …

Google’s web crawlers have come a long way in recent years in their ability to fetch and execute JavaScript. However, JavaScript integration remains tricky when setting up the front end of a web app. It requires extra network calls and processing time to load content, which increases browser CPU usage and page load times. A web app that relies entirely on client-side JavaScript can still exceed the capacity of Google’s Web Rendering Service (WRS), making it difficult for Googlebot to crawl and index content. JavaScript is still the backbone of the web – the only language that can run natively in the browser. At the same time, the rise of large langu…

Coding websites was my personal Everest in college, when I first started to learn WordPress to help my dad build his domain portfolio. He had registered thousands of domains while flipping through the dictionary in the early ‘90s, and if I had AI capabilities back then, I’d be retired by now. Alas, we’re finally living the future. Last week, I individually built 12 landing pages in two days using Cursor, an AI-powered code editor that allows you to generate and edit landing pages using simple prompts, no hand-coding required. What used to take me a marketing manager, copywriter, designer, developer, and weeks of production, was suddenly handled in a fr…

My SEO colleagues have a tall task on their hands, one that grows taller by the day as AI-powered search proliferates: compensating for eroding website traffic. Yes, I’m talking about zero-click search, which is taking root across AI search and LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini – and the AI Overviews creeping into more traditional SERPs. A recent report featured in these pages cites an organic SERP CTR drop between .64% and 1.41%. The smart money is on that CTR dropping as zero-click search behavior gains momentum. (Though recent Semrush data showed zero-click behavior declined slightly.) I would also bet on Google finding more ways to minimize th…

Google is investigating a data discrepancy issue affecting Google Ad Manager and Data Transfer reports stemming from an incident that began on May 2 at 14:00 UTC. The details. Users can still access the platforms, but reports for May 2 between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC may be incomplete. A filtration issue appears to have caused some data to be excluded from both Ad Manager reports and Data Transfer files. Discrepancies are possible between the two data sources. Why we care. Publishers may notice missing or inconsistent data in reports and Data Transfer files generated during a critical one-hour window, potentially affecting revenue tracking and campaign analysis. W…

Searches on Apple’s Safari browser declined for the first time last month, and Apple’s senior vice president of services Eddy Cue blamed AI. “That has never happened in 22 years,” according to Cue. “People are using AI,” Cue testified Wednesday during the DOJ’s antitrust trial against Google, calling it a fundamental shift that’s eating into traditional search’s dominance. AI search rising. Apple is exploring a revamp of Safari to prioritize AI-powered search engines, Cue testified. AI search tools like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic are being seriously evaluated, though they aren’t yet ready to be defaults, Cue said. “There is much greater potential. T…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is upending the economic engine of the web, and Google is at the center of the disruption, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. What Prince said. In a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Prince said: “AI is going to fundamentally change the business model of the web. The business model of the web for the last 15 years has been search… search drives everything that happens online.” The Google tipping point. Google’s value exchange with content creators has collapsed, Prince said: “Ten years ago… for every two pages of a website that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. … That was the trad…

Google is getting worse – or at least, that’s what “we” say. The common complaint: Search is dying, SEO is trash, and Google is nearly unusable. X, LinkedIn, and Reddit are awash with complaints about deteriorating search quality. The contradicting reality: Search remains the dominant channel for web traffic. Google still holds 90% of the search market, grew 20% year over year, and processes 5 trillion searches annually. If it were truly broken, wouldn’t we have left by now? The complex truth: Poet John Keats described “negative capability” as the ability to hold conflicting ideas without demanding a simple answer. That’s whe…

Keyword research is one of the most important tasks for both SEOs and paid search practitioners. While there are plenty of robust tools on the market, Google Ads Keyword Planner is a great, free starting point. You can explore keywords, see their search volume, and even get an idea of potential costs – all without spending a dime on ads. In this article, I’ll answer key questions, including: Where can I find Keyword Planner in Google Ads? Should I start with keywords or start with a website? What does a “keyword” mean in Keyword Planner? How can I use Keyword Planner to plan my Search campaigns? Should I pick high volume or low volume keyword…

As AI-driven search engines rewrite the rules of content visibility, one thing is clear: optimization isn’t dead — it’s evolving. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity AI don’t just retrieve web pages; they synthesize answers. And your content? It only gets included if it’s clear, relevant, and easy to extract. The good news? If you’re already using the Yoast SEO plugin, you have some of the most critical tools for this new era baked right into your workflow. Table of contents Learn how to structure content for AI What AI search wants from your content The Flesch Reading Ease score is more important than ever Don’t ignore those g…

BigQuery is one of the most underutilized tools in PPC. While data professionals have been leveraging data warehousing and Structured Query Language (SQL) for years, many PPC specialists still rely on in-platform reporting and third-party tools such as Optmyzr and TrueClicks. But with Google’s evolving data limitations, increased automation, and the growing importance of first-party data, mastering BigQuery is becoming a game-changer for paid search experts. What is BigQuery? BigQuery is Google’s fully managed, serverless data warehouse that lets you store and analyze massive datasets using SQL. Unlike Google Ads, Google Analytics 4, or Google Search …

AI Overviews are no longer an experiment – they’re live, prominent, and already changing how people interact with Google Search. For content creators and marketers, that means traditional SEO strategies are under new pressure. When Google answers a query before users scroll, visibility no longer depends just on rankings. It hinges on whether your content is selected, cited, or even needed. This shift calls for more than short-term tweaks. It demands a rethinking of how SEO works both now and in the future. So, what can you do when AI Overviews take the spotlight in search? How to stay visible when Google’s AI Overview answers first When AI Overviews…

Want to supercharge your customer acquisition efforts? Join industry-leading experts as they share their acquisition strategies at Acxiom’s exclusive Accelerate Acquisition event, May 14 at The Ritz-Carlton New York, NoMad. Connect with top marketers and enjoy an afternoon learning proven strategies designed to boost your customer acquisition programs. The agenda includes: Guiding principles marketers need to know to better understand and engage customers How a top retailer used Adobe Customer Journey Analytics to improve customers’ experience Multi-touch strategies you can use today to increase response rates Stick around for cocktails at the stunni…

Looking to do more with your first-party data? Behavioral marketing offers a powerful, privacy-conscious way to deepen customer engagement and improve performance. This guide from Acoustic breaks down seven proven strategies to help you collect, activate, and apply behavioral insights across the funnel. Whether you’re refining B2B nurture journeys or scaling cross-channel personalization, these tactics can help you shift from guesswork to real-time relevance. You’ll learn: How to build a cohesive first-party data strategy Why behavioral signals are the key to closing visibility gaps How AI and machine learning unlock smarter targeting and content Why ret…

The U.S. Department of Justice is calling for Google to break up its digital advertising empire after a federal judge ruled the tech giant had illegally maintained monopoly power in the ad exchange market. Driving the news. In a court filing on Sunday, the DOJ said Google should divest its AdX exchange, where ad inventory is bought and sold. It should also sell its DFP platform, used by publishers to manage and serve ads. The sales would be overseen by a court-appointed trustee, who would find buyers and monitor compliance. Why we care. The DOJ’s proposal to force Google to sell off AdX and DFP strikes at the core of Google’s multibillion-dollar ad tech stack. A s…

ChatGPT announced the addition of shopping features to search last week. But how exactly is ChatGPT search choosing products and ranking them? Here’s what you need to know from OpenAI’s documentation. How product results are selected. When ChatGPT detects shopping intent in a query, it selects products based on a mix of the following: User intent and context Based on the user’s current query (e.g., “funny dog costumes”). May include saved memory (e.g., past dislikes, such as “clowns”). May factor in custom instructions (e.g., preferences like “I want affordable options”). Structured third-party data. Product metadata such as: Price. Product des…

From answering complex queries to generating creative content, large language models (LLMs) are designed to deliver “zero-click” results – concise, direct answers that eliminate the need for further research. This shift raises a critical question: if users no longer need to visit a website to get the information they want, what happens to web traffic? While the broader implications for the future of websites are a conversation for another day, there’s a more immediate and tactical issue worth examining – links. Specifically: What kind of links are LLMs providing, and how can brands generate traffic from them? The critical role of links in LLM outputs L…

Google’s AI Overviews appeared in 13.14% of all U.S. desktop searches in March, up from 6.49% in January. That’s a 102% surge in just two months, according to a new analysis of more than 10 million keywords by Semrush and Datos. Why we care. Google’s introduction of AI Overviews was the biggest shift since the arrival of featured snippets a decade ago. Google is forever changed and is becoming more of an answer engine than a search engine. That’s because AI Overviews generate answers rather than pointing searchers to websites, which studies have shown is impacting traffic and CTRs for many types of websites. Triggers. AI Overviews tend to appear for low-risk, fact…

In 2023, I said that creator-led content marketing would shape the future of search. Two years later, that future has arrived – faster and more broadly than expected. In the past year alone, adoption has surged among consumers and, in turn, brands. The conversation has grown bigger, faster-moving, and more complex than I initially imagined. Today’s users no longer just “Google it.” They discover and trust information through: TikTok videos. Reddit threads. YouTube Shorts. Instagram Reels. Community forums. Google has adapted, integrating user-generated content and lived experiences directly into its search results via feat…

Google Ads today announced AI Max, a new tool to reach untapped queries and tailor ads with a single click. Rolling out globally in beta later this month, Google said AI Max integrates its most advanced targeting and creative tools into Search campaigns. Smarter matching. Broad match and keywordless tech help advertisers tap into high-performing queries they may have otherwise missed. Google AI learns from existing keywords, creative, and URLs to identify new opportunities. Real-time creative adaptation. New “text customization” (formerly “automatically created assets”) creates headlines and descriptions tailored to a user’s query – adapting on the fly to matc…

Generative AI is changing how people search. The most effective SEO strategies aren’t just AI-enhanced – they’re AI-native. Many SEO teams are moving away from manual tasks and siloed tools toward intelligent, automated systems that learn from data and scale performance across every stage of the search journey. From content creation to site architecture and real-time monitoring, AI is now deeply embedded in many winning SEO strategies. Here are 10 cutting-edge ways to leverage AI for enterprise-level SEO success in 2025 – and stay ahead in a game that’s changing faster than ever. 1. Automating SEO tasks with AI agents AI in SEO is no longer just a…

A new report from Cint reveals that 74% of market researchers are already using AI in their workflows — especially for data analysis (81%) and project setup (78%). For agency and brand marketers that rely on audience insights, testing, and fast-turnaround campaign planning, this shift signals how research partners and internal teams are evolving their methods. However, the same study finds a sharp divide around synthetic data. While it’s occasionally used to boost niche sample sizes, a full 60% of respondents view it negatively, citing concerns around ethics, authenticity, and reliability. Download the full report to see how AI and synthetic data are reshaping mar…

To keep your Meta Ads performing at their best, it’s essential to regularly test new ad formats. This article explores the role of UGC and EGC ads – and how to effectively test them in your Meta campaigns. Understanding UGC and EGC ads User-generated content (UGC) refers to videos typically created by actual users of your product or service, often testimonials or a series of testimonials edited together. In some cases, UGC may even come from the company founder, recorded casually on a phone or using other non-professional methods. These videos are often recorded on a phone – or styled to look that way, even if professionally produced – to create an int…

Bad data = bad strategy. Duplicate conversions are one of the most overlooked – and most damaging – problems in conversion tracking. If your reporting inflates the number of conversions, your performance strategy is based on fiction. You’re not just getting the wrong numbers. You’re optimizing toward the wrong outcomes. This issue impacts everything: Bidding. Budget allocation. Long-term growth. This article breaks down: Why duplicate conversions happen. How to find them. Most importantly, how to eliminate them for good. The cost of inaccurate conversion data Paid search loves precision. Conversion data is your nor…