SEO Tools and Resources

SerpApi is asking a federal court to dismiss Reddit’s lawsuit over alleged scraping of Reddit content from Google Search, saying Reddit is trying to use copyright law to control user posts and public search results. The motion follows Reddit’s amended complaint filed in February. SerpApi says the filing still fails to show copyright ownership, circumvention of technical protections, or concrete harm. SerpApi’s argument. SerpApi CEO Julien Khaleghy, in a blog post today, argued the lawsuit fails for several reasons: Reddit doesn’t own most of the content at issue. Its user agreement states that users retain ownership. Reddit holds only a non-exclusive …

Chloe Varnfield, a digital marketing specialist at Atelier Studios with nearly eight years in PPC, joined me to share the mistakes that shaped her career — and the lessons every advertiser should take from them. When Google sneaks settings past you Chloe’s first story centers on Google’s account-level automated assets setting — a feature so well hidden that many advertisers don’t know it exists until a client sends a screenshot asking why their headline looks completely wrong. The setting, buried behind a three-dot menu, defaults to on, meaning Google can automatically generate and serve headlines advertisers never wrote or approved. The takeaway: always audit your…

Are you watching your team’s creative operations buckle under mounting pressure? You’re not alone. As project complexity skyrockets and client demands intensify, creative leaders face an unprecedented challenge: scaling operations without sacrificing quality or burning out teams. The solution isn’t working harder, rather, it’s working smarter with technology that transforms your entire content lifecycle. Here’s how forward-thinking creative operations leaders are building resilient, scalable workflows that thrive in 2025’s demanding landscape. The perfect storm facing creative operations Creative teams are caught in a maelstrom of expectations and pressure…

Over the past decade, I’ve reviewed hundreds of resumes, conducted countless interviews, and led numerous technical tests for SEO candidates. Along the way, I’ve met many exceptional professionals — but I’ve also noticed a recurring pattern of common interview mistakes that can hold even the most talented candidates back. Below are 11 common mistakes I’ve observed in SEO interviews — and how you can easily avoid them. 1. Projecting arrogance instead of confidence Confidence is great! While imposter syndrome is common in SEO, it’s important to maintain realistic confidence in your skills and experience. However, there is a fine line between projecting conf…

The rules of organic content are shifting from a “publish more” to a “prove more” mindset. Search results increasingly answer questions directly through AI summaries, shopping features, and other SERP integrations. Visibility alone doesn’t resolve buyer uncertainty. For ecommerce brands, organic visibility now requires recognition and trust amid the noise on the SERPs. The 2026 game is both simpler and more demanding. Invest in organic assets that: Reduce buyer uncertainty. Are machine-readable. Compound across multiple discovery surfaces. The forces shaping organic content’s ROI in 2026 Today’s search is defined by three forces changing how cont…

The webpage is no longer the unit of digital visibility. For years, we’ve built our digital presence on a foundation of URLs and keywords, but that infrastructure was designed for a highway that AI has now bypassed. In the search everywhere revolution, the most powerful atomic unit is the entity — a well-defined, machine-readable representation of a concept, product, organization, or person. The brands establishing AI-era dominance are engineering entity authority. To survive the shift from traditional search to generative discovery, we must move beyond the page and focus on entity linkage to build a foundation of AI visibility. The e…

LinkedIn is launching a new AI-powered feed ranking system that uses large language models and GPUs to analyze post content and surface more relevant updates to its 1.3 billion members. Why we care. Understanding how LinkedIn surfaces content is critical if you want your posts — or your brand’s — to be discovered. The new system prioritizes topical relevance and engagement patterns, LinkedIn said. Posts that demonstrate expertise and align with emerging professional conversations may travel farther across the network — even without existing connections. The details. LinkedIn rebuilt much of its feed recommendation system using large language models, transformer mo…

The words “incremental” and “incrementality” get thrown around in affiliate marketing, but they might not mean what they sound like. There may be no increase in actual sales, new customers, or revenue. Affiliate marketers who refer to incrementality often look at it only within the affiliate channel, not across your company as a whole. To determine whether affiliates are truly incremental, ask a simple question: Would the sale have happened without the affiliate program? The answer determines whether the partner is bringing you new customers and revenue or simply intercepting customers already in your checkout flow. Why high-intent traffic doesn’t always mean…

Google appears to be testing a new “Sponsored Shops” format in Google Shopping results that highlights entire stores instead of individual products — a potential shift in how brands compete in Shopping ads. What’s happening. Instead of displaying only single product listings, the new block groups multiple products from the same retailer into one sponsored unit. The format features the store name, several products from that shop, and signals such as ratings and brand presence, effectively creating a mini storefront directly inside the Shopping results. Why we care. The new “Sponsored Shops” format in Google Shopping could shift competition from individual produ…

OpenAI is beginning to build the infrastructure for a formal advertising business around ChatGPT — but early performance signals suggest the company still has work to do to match established search platforms. What’s happening. OpenAI started testing an Ads Manager dashboard with a small group of partners, according to confirmation shared with ADWEEK. The tool allows marketers to launch, monitor, and optimise campaigns in real time, similar to the campaign management platforms used across digital advertising. Why we care. OpenAI is beginning to build a self-serve ads ecosystem around ChatGPT with a dedicated Ads Manager, as they prepare for AI assistants becoming a…

As Google rolls out AI Overviews, AI Mode in Search, and the Gemini ecosystem, we face a growing challenge: what happens when users get answers — and soon complete purchases — without leaving Google’s interfaces? Enter Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), now in beta. UCP is designed to help brands to sell to consumers without leaving the Gemini or LLM experience. Consumers can check out within the LLM, add rewards points, and fully execute the transaction. Here’s an example flow: How Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol works At its core, UCP standardizes how consumer AI interfaces communicate with merchant checkout systems. When a user tells G…

Google is expanding capabilities in Google Ads Editor to give advertisers more creative flexibility, automation control, and budget precision — especially as AI-driven campaign types continue to evolve. What’s new. The 2.12 release introduces a wide set of updates across Performance Max, Demand Gen, and video campaigns, with a clear focus on scaling creative assets and improving workflow efficiency. Creative expansion. Performance Max campaigns now support up to 15 videos per asset group, allowing advertisers to feed more variations into Google’s AI for testing. The addition of 9:16 vertical images also reflects growing demand for mobile-first formats, particularl…

Google is doubling down on the infrastructure behind “agentic commerce,” introducing new capabilities to its Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) while making it easier for retailers to plug in. Google says UCP — its open standard for connecting retailers to AI-powered shopping experiences — is getting new features designed to make online buying feel more like a traditional storefront, even when handled by automated agents. What’s new. The latest updates focus on making shopping via AI agents more functional and flexible. A new cart capability allows agents to add or save multiple products from a single retailer in one go, mirroring how a typical shopper builds …

Small publishers are seeing sharp traffic declines from AI search experiences, according to new data from thousands of global sites using Chartbeat analytics. The details. Publishers with 1,000 to 10,000 daily pageviews lost 60% of search referral traffic over two years, Chartbeat found. Mid-sized sites with 10,000 to 100,000 daily pageviews lost 47%. Large publishers with more than 100,000 daily pageviews were down 22%. Reality check. AI referrals aren’t replacing lost search traffic. Google Search pageviews fell 34% year over year. Google Discover dropped 15%. ChatGPT referrals rose 200% but still account for less than 1% of total traffic. …

Google’s AI Overviews now appear on 14% of shopping queries, up 5.6x from 2.1% in November 2025, according to new Visibility Labs analysis. Ecommerce brands have been mostly unaffected by AI-driven click loss in Search. That seems to be changing. Why we care. As Google’s AI Overviews expand across product searches, ecommerce brands face a growing risk of losing visibility and clicks before shoppers reach standard organic or Shopping listings. The details. The analysis targeted product-intent keywords tied to results with a Shopping box, paid or organic — terms like “weighted blanket,” “mushroom coffee,” “protein powder,” and “blue T-shirts.” That produce…

As conversational search gains traction, the bigger question isn’t who has more users, but who can monetize them. Google enters this phase with a massive advantage: mature ad systems, deep advertiser adoption, and decades of optimization. Early AI Mode signals point to a measured rollout. The panic phase is over After a period of panic within the company, Google’s built-in advantages, coupled with massive capital expenditures, have helped it regain ground on category leader ChatGPT in LLM search. In December 2025, Google’s own code red became OpenAI’s code red. The dust will continue to settle, and analysts have different takes. But one signal stands o…

The Visibility Governance Maturity Model (VGMM) is about something most SEO programs lack: clear ownership, documented processes, and decision rights that keep your work from being undone by teams who don’t understand it. So how do you actually score that? Each domain uses a bank of governance questions tailored to the business. They’re not about how SEO is executed. They’re not about tools. And they’re not an audit. What VGMM questions are designed to reveal VGMM questions go to managers and the C-suite — the people who should know about governance but often don’t. Meanwhile, you (the SEO practitioner) actually know whether standards are documented, wheth…

Multi-location brands are investing heavily in content. But more content doesn’t automatically mean more growth. I keep seeing the same issue. Each individual location has a blog, and they all cover the same topics. Same keywords. Same structure. Same search intent. The goal is local visibility, but the result is often internal competition and diluted authority. Building an effective content strategy for multi-location brands requires clarity around roles. What should live at the corporate level to build authority, and what should stay local to drive relevance and conversions? Without that alignment, brands risk competing with themselves instead of winning in sear…

Every time a new large language model (LLM) drops or Google tweaks an AI Overview, the SEO industry loses its mind. We develop this weird collective amnesia, scrambling to optimize for features that were actually mapped out in patent offices 10 years ago. We’re so obsessed with the now and the next that we’ve stopped looking at the blueprints. If you want to survive 2026, stop trying to be a futurist. Instead, be an archaeologist. To actually deliver for our clients, we need a research framework that isn’t just reactive. It has to be a balance: Look back at the foundational patents to understand the rules, and look ahead to see how AI is finally being given the mu…

Walmart said conversion rates for purchases made directly inside ChatGPT were three times lower than when users clicked through to its website. Why we care. This suggests agentic commerce isn’t ready to replace traditional shopping. Sending users to owned environments still drives higher conversion rates. The details. Starting in November, Walmart offered about 200,000 products through OpenAI’s Instant Checkout. Users could complete purchases inside ChatGPT without visiting Walmart’s site. Daniel Danker, Walmart’s EVP of product and design, said those in-chat purchases converted at one-third the rate of click-out transactions. He called the experience “uns…

Adobe will shut down the SEO feature in Marketo Engage at the end of March 2026, according to its February 2026 release notes. The tool will be deprecated on March 31, and you must export any existing SEO data before then. (This page includes links to the export instructions.) The SEO tile will be removed from the platform on April 1. What happened? Adobe’s Keith Gluck said deprecating low-use features lets the Marketo Engage team focus on other areas of the platform. For your SEO needs, Adobe announced in 2025 that it was acquiring Semrush, a full-featured SEO and visibility tool. (Reminder: Semrush owns Third Door Media, the publisher of Search Engine Land.…

If your law firm’s referrals aren’t converting, validation may be the problem. Referred prospects don’t go straight from recommendation to contact. They research, compare, and verify what they were told — on your website, in search results, and through AI tools. These are your highest-value leads — pre-sold through trusted recommendations and expected to be your easiest conversions. But when that validation falls short, even they lose momentum. This is the referral validation gap: the moments during online research when trust is broken rather than built. Here’s where referral validation fails and how to fix it. While this article focuses on law firms, t…

SEO has moved past shortcuts and quick wins. What drives results now isn’t just content — it’s content that earns attention, builds trust, and converts. Storytelling plays a direct role in that. Used well, it can improve engagement signals, strengthen relevance, and turn traffic into action. Here are seven storytelling techniques to apply in your business blog. 7 storytelling techniques that drive engagement and conversions Use these to shape how your content flows, from the opening hook to the final call to action. 1. Hook the reader T.S. Eliot put it simply: “If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.” Many modern authors recomme…

Google is cleaning up outdated requirements in Google Ads, reflecting how legacy ad formats have evolved into newer, more automated products. What’s happening. As of March 17th, Google discontinued multiple ad format policies, including those related to form ads, image quality, responsive ads, and text ads. What changed. These requirements are being removed because the original formats have transitioned into newer campaign types and ad experiences, making the old policy frameworks no longer relevant. Why we care. This update simplifies the policy landscape in Google Ads, reducing confusion around outdated requirements tied to legacy formats. What advertise…

Perplexity’s new Comet browser for iOS defaults to Google Search. That’s because mobile queries often focus on navigation, local results, and transactions, where “Google does a much better job … than anyone else … including Perplexity,” according to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. Comet for iOS. It includes Perplexity’s AI assistant directly in the browser. Comet for iOS also blends AI answers with standard search results. For many queries, you’ll still see a traditional results page. You can ask questions by voice while browsing. The assistant can summarize pages, answer questions, and take actions like drafting emails. Deep Research features generate cit…