SEO Tools and Resources

Starting in March 2026, Google Merchant Center will enforce a new system for multi-channel products — items sold both online and in physical stores — requiring advertisers to use separate product IDs when those products differ by channel. What’s changing. Under the new approach, online product attributes will become the default. If a product’s in-store details differ, advertisers will need to create a second version with a distinct product ID and manage it independently in their feeds. What advertisers should do. Google has started emailing affected accounts, flagging products that need updates ahead of the March deadline. Retailers should review their product…

Google is retiring legacy Search automation tools, including Dynamic Search Ads (DSA), in favor of AI Max, its broader AI-powered campaign suite. This will affect you if you use DSA, automatically created assets (ACA), or campaign-level broad match settings. Driving the news. AI Max for Search campaigns is exiting beta after adoption by “hundreds of thousands” of advertisers globally, Google said. Starting in September, eligible campaigns using DSA, ACA, or campaign-level broad match will be automatically migrated to AI Max. Google will stop allowing advertisers to create new DSA campaigns through Google Ads, Ads Editor, and the Ads API once automatic upgrades…

Google will shut down three long-running Google Groups support forums for advertising developers early next year as it consolidates technical support into official channels. Driving the news. Google announced it will stop responding to new posts starting January 28, 2026. The forums will remain visible as read-only archives until later in the year, when Google plans to disable new posts entirely. After Jan. 28: Support agents will no longer reply on Google Groups. Replies to existing threads will trigger a new email thread with Google support instead. Content will stay online for reference — including past discussions and solutions. The shift. Googl…

Google is rolling out a new update for the Trends Explorer page that is powered by Gemini. The goal is to make it easier for users and researchers to find more search terms to explore. “The updated Explore page has a new side panel that uses Gemini capabilities to automatically identify and compare relevant trends for your area of interest,” Google wrote. What it looks like. There is this new layout and new “Suggest search terms” button at the top right of the page. Here is a screenshot: When you click on “Suggest search terms,” you can enter in a keyword or a natural language sentence and Gemini will help you break out all the terms and compare them to each o…

Google is gearing up to launch Partner Match, a new targeting option that allows advertisers to use third-party partner data to create custom audiences for YouTube campaigns, according to newly published help documentation. How it works. Partner Match enables approved third-party partners to upload hashed user data—such as email, name, or ZIP code—which Google will match to signed-in YouTube accounts. Advertisers can then target these matched segments across: Video Reach campaigns Video Views campaigns Demand Gen campaigns (YouTube channel only) It will not support ad sequences or YouTube Select guaranteed deals. Where it’s available. Partner Match …

Google released a new help page detailing Asset testing for retailers, a specialized experiment type for Performance Max campaigns that lets you measure the effectiveness of your creative assets. What’s new. The new experimental feature tests asset impact within a single PMax campaign: A control group (feed-only) is compared against a treatment group (with added assets). The results are viewable in the Experiment report. Split testing without duplicate campaigns. Unlike traditional A/B testing that requires running parallel campaigns, this new feature splits traffic within a single Performance Max campaign: Control group: Shows product feed-only ads. …

Google is rolling out a suite of updates aimed at giving marketers sharper insight into what works, and why, across campaigns and platforms, as announced today at Google Marketing Live 2025. What’s new: Easier incrementality testing: You can now test what’s truly driving value across all campaign types, with lower spend thresholds and better testing methods. Smarter cross-channel insights: Google Analytics now offers improved measurement of the full customer journey and ROI, with deeper impression-level data coming soon across Google and beyond. New Data Manager tools: A centralized hub helps marketers gather, store, and activate first-party data from …

Google is rolling out Smart Bidding Exploration, as announced today at Google Marketing Live 2025. This major update is designed to give advertisers more flexibility – and more conversions – by tapping into previously overlooked search queries. What’s new: Flexible ROAS targets. Advertisers (e.g., mortgage lenders) can now broaden their reach beyond narrow, high-intent searches (e.g., “mortgage rates”) to more exploratory ones (e.g., “how to buy a home”). Smarter AI. Built on existing AI-powered tools like AI Max, Smart Bidding Exploration helps campaigns capture high-performing searches from new, unique categories. Why we care. Digital marketers have l…

Google updated its Google image SEO best practices help document to recommend that you use the same image file name URL for the same image, even if you place that same image on different pages on your site. Google said you should do this to save with your site’s overall crawl budget. What Google changed. Google added the following two lines to the Google image SEO best practices help document: “If an image is referenced on multiple pages within a larger website, consider the site’s overall crawl budget. In particular, consistently reference the image with the same URL, so that Google can cache and reuse the image without needing to request it multiple times.”…

Google is updating the links within AI Mode to encourage searchers to click on those links. Google also expanded its Web Guides labs test to the all tab, you still need to opt-in to the experiment. Links in AI Mode. Robby Stein, VP of Product, Google Search, wrote, “We’re increasing the number of inline links in AI Mode, and updating the design of those links to make them more useful.” We’ve seen Google testing variations of inline links and contextual links in AI Mode and Google is now releasing some of those user experiences. Robby Stein told us in August Google would be releasing some of these features and here they are. Google is also adding contextual introdu…

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…

Google expanded its structured data support for forum and Q&A pages, adding properties that help you signal reply threads, quoted content, and whether content is human- or machine-generated. The update aims to reduce how Google misreads discussion and Q&A content. What changed. Google’s QAPage docs now support commentCount and digitalSourceType. DiscussionForumPosting docs now support sharedContent plus the same commentCount and digitalSourceType. The details. In Q&A markup, you can use commentCount on questions, answers, and comments to show total comments even if not fully marked up. answerCount + commentCount should equal total replies of any type.…

Google is rolling out performance upgrades for Display & Video 360’s connected TV (CTV) ad solutions, enhancing audience targeting, measurement, and campaign insights. Key upgrades: Enhanced audience targeting. Marketers can now reach households based on demographics, shared interests, or purchase intent. Improved measurement. New conversion tracking capabilities in Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager 360 will help advertisers connect CTV ads to household purchasing behavior. Household-level insights. Reach metrics will now include household-level data alongside existing people-based reach, improving comparisons between CTV and traditional TV. …

Google updated both its image SEO best practices and Google Discover help documents to clarify that Google uses both schema.org markup and the og:image meta tag as sources when determining image thumbnails in Google Search and Discover. Image SEO best practices. Google added a new section to the image SEO best practices help document named Specify a preferred image with metadata. In that section, Google wrote: “Google’s selection of an image preview is completely automated and takes into account a number of different sources to select which image on a given page is shown on Google (for example, a text result image or the preview image in Discover).” Here is ho…

With Google’s introduction of its vision match feature, users can now describe a product they’re looking for, and AI will generate suggestions similar to that item. The real kicker is that the product generated likely doesn’t exist. The AI will create something that you want, show you the product, and then try to match the AI product with items from the real world. It sounds like a streamlined, user-friendly shopping experience that could revolutionize online shopping yet again. But does it actually enhance our shopping journey? Are these AI-generated results truly more effective than the product results we get from traditional Google search? …

Google’s Ads and Commerce product lead, Vidhya Srinivasan, today outlined how the company is reimagining advertising as “avenues for tailored exploration” in response to unpredictable consumer behavior. The big picture: Google is focusing on three key solutions to help advertisers break through: AI-powered shopping innovations. Google launched several new shopping features, including ads in Lens, AI-powered Google Shopping, 3D product spins, and virtual try-on experiences for clothing items. YouTube creator partnerships. The platform’s highly engaged audiences, particularly Gen Z, trust creator recommendations 98% more than those on other social platforms (acc…

Want your business to show up in Google’s AI-driven results? The same principles that help you rank in Google Search still matter – but AI introduces new dimensions of context, reputation, and reasoning, according to Robby Stein, VP of Product, Google Search. PR for AI. In an interview with Marina Mogilko of Silicon Valley Girl, Stein said AI “thinks a lot like a person would,” and agreed with her assessment that you’re investing in PR not for people to see it, but for AI. Stein said: “If you’re a business and you’re mentioned in top business lists or from a public article that lots of people end up finding, those kinds of things become useful for the AI to find…

In one of the most consequential regulatory moves yet for the future of search, the European Commission has launched a formal antitrust investigation into Google. At the center of the complaint is Google’s use of publisher content to train and power AI Overviews and other generative AI features – while potentially diverting traffic away from original sources. For anyone working in SEO, content strategy, or brand visibility, the implications are immediate. Is Google crossing a line by repurposing publisher content for AI-generated answers, or is this simply the cost of participating in an open, crawlable web? With regulators now stepping in, the industry …

Google Search Console’s performance report is stuck and has not shown an update in the main report since Sunday, October 19th. Google confirmed the issue and said it will catch up. What it looks like. As I said on the Search Engine Roundtable, before Google confirmed the issue, the performance reports for all Search Console profiles are stuck on Sunday. Here is a sample chart: More details. The weird thing is that when you dive in to 24 hour data, you do get recent data. So it does seem like the data is being collected and stored but it just isn’t being rendered in most of the reporting. In addition, when you click on the by date breakdown under the chart…

Google has confirmed issues with the Local Service Ads advertiser console and said they are “investigating and working to resolve this with high priority.” Since this morning, advertisers trying to access the Google Local Service Ads advertiser console have been hit by timeouts, 500 status codes and other errors preventing them from manage LSAs. Confirmation. Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, confirmed the issue on X just minutes ago: The team is investigating and working to resolve this with high priority. — AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) April 2, 2025 The issue. There are a number of complaints on social media about LSAs not being accessible. Here are some …

Google introduced a new user agent, called Google-Agent, that signals when AI agents act on users’ behalf, marking an early shift toward agent-driven web interactions. What happened. Google added Google-Agent to its list of user-triggered fetchers on March 20 and has begun a gradual rollout. The Google-Agent user agent identifies requests made by AI agents running on Google infrastructure, including experimental tools like Project Mariner. How it works. Google-Agent appears in HTTP requests when an AI agent visits a site to complete a user-initiated task. Example use cases include browsing pages, evaluating content, or taking actions such as submitting f…

I’m getting a mid-career executive MBA. Last week, in class, we discussed the interaction between automation and advertising. The lecture covered why A/B testing in Meta is less valuable now, since Facebook can auto-optimize faster and better than marketers can on their own. A classmate took the logical leap and asked the professor, “If digital channels have more data and more processing power, why don’t advertisers just give them a URL and a credit card and let them go wild?” The argument has real merit. Google, Meta, and LinkedIn have access to more data than any agency ever will. Their optimization engines are improving fast. Handing them a budget and a URL an…

Google’s 2024 Ads Safety Report, released today, shows a massive uptick in how AI – particularly large language models (LLMs) – is helping the company block policy-violating ads before serving a single ad, thanks to earlier fraud detection at the account setup stage. By the numbers. Google Ads last year: Removed 5.1 billion bad ads Restricted 9.1 billion ads Suspended 39.2 million advertiser accounts. Enforced against 1.3 billion publisher pages. Blocked or removed 415 million scam-related ads. Introduced 30+ policy updates across Ads and Publisher guidelines. Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz has been following these stats for se…

Google says its AI-powered advertising tools are starting to deliver meaningful results, including major revenue gains for some retailers, as it experiments with how ads work in AI-driven search. The big picture. Fears that AI chatbots like ChatGPT would disrupt Google’s core search business haven’t materialized, and instead the company’s ads business continues to grow, suggesting AI may be expanding how people search rather than replacing it. By the numbers: Alphabet Inc. surpassed $400 billion in revenue in 2025. Q4 ad revenue: $82.28 billion (+13.5% YoY). YouTube ads: $11.38 billion (+~9% YoY). What’s happened. Google is embedding ads into its A…

Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, is clarifying how keyword match types interact with AI Overviews (AIO) and AI Mode ad placements — addressing ongoing confusion among advertisers testing AI Max and mixed match-type setups. Why we care. As ads expand into AI-powered placements, advertisers need to understand which keywords are eligible to serve — and when — to avoid unintentionally blocking reach or misreading performance. Back in May. Responding to questions from Marketing Director Yoav Eitani, Marvin confirmed that an ad can serve either above or below an AI Overview or within the AI Overview — but not both in the same auction: “Your ad could trigger to s…