SEO Tools and Resources

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a bold claim about the future of advertising in a recent interview (emphasis mine): “You’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.” Zuckerberg paints an interesting future. But it’s not quite reality. Meta Ads’ AI isn’t replacing digital marketers anytime soon. Still, its best practices – from automation to targeting –…

By now, most marketers have at least dabbled with generative AI (GenAI) tools and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. They’ve heard that their competitors are using the technology to practically create entire campaigns with the push of a button. And they’re aware that AI is reshaping marketing and perhaps are both excited and a little worried about what the future will bring. To date, much of the early conversation about putting AI into production at scale has centered on the need for good prompt engineering — the ability to ask the right questions of this powerful technology. We’ve been told our successful use of the technology hinges on thi…

Calling it “inevitable,” Google executives expect Search to lose traffic to Gemini or rival AI answer engine ChatGPT, according to an internal document from October. Why we care. Google generated nearly $200 billion in revenue from Search in 2024. However, Google launched many new AI features and products (e.g., AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini) in the past two years that have radically changed search as we’ve known it for more than two decades. Now it’s confirmed that Google executives think it’s “inevitable” that Google will lose search traffic due to AI. ChatGPT’s impact. An internal summary of takeaways from a meeting with top execs – including Liz Reid, Vidhya S…

The newly released Dotdigital Global Benchmark Report 2025 reveals a surprising trend: email volumes rose 23.9% year-over-year, and engagement metrics improved alongside them. Click-through rates doubled. Click-to-open rates jumped by 50%. Unsubscribes remained low at just 0.13%. The report analyzes billions of cross-channel interactions across industries, offering marketing teams rare insight into how leading brands are outperforming. With smarter segmentation, deeper personalization, and multi-channel orchestration, the data suggests that more can indeed mean better—when it’s done right. Why It Matters For digital marketers, ops leads, and marketing direc…

Google is facing a potential €2.97 billion ($3.3 billion) antitrust lawsuit in Italy, accusing the tech giant of stifling competition through anticompetitive practices. The lawsuit, filed by Moltiply Group, claims Google used its dominance in the search engine market to undermine the growth of its rival price comparison platform, Trovaprezzi.it, operated by Moltiply subsidiary 7Pixel. Key allegations. Moltiply argues that between 2010 and 2017, Google prioritized its own Google Shopping service over competitors, suppressing other comparison websites’ visibility. The lawsuit leans on a significant 2017 ruling by the European Court of Justice, which fined Goo…

Google has released a detailed Q&A for advertisers to clarify how its new AI Max tool works, addressing key questions around performance, control, and automation in search advertising. With the rollout of AI Max, a suite of ad tools powered by generative AI and search intelligence, the company is pitching it as the future of automated, performance-driven search advertising. What it does AI Max uses Google AI to: Match your ads with more relevant searches – even ones you aren’t bidding on. Customize ad copy dynamically based on user intent. Send users to your most relevant landing pages automatically. Questions asked by advertisers, answered b…

Users who arrive on websites from LLMs are generally less likely to engage than those from traditional organic search. That’s according to a new study published today by Dan Taylor of SALT.agency. This new data seems to challenge claims by Google and Microsoft Bing that citations from AI search results result in higher-quality clicks. Why we care. It’s good to know that SEO remains a valuable channel. But it’s not good to know that search engines seem to be making fallacious statements to the entire community, all to support their “AI is the best thing ever” narrative. By the numbers. In most sectors, organic traffic outperforms LLM referrals in driving engage…

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.”…

A little over a year ago, I wrote an article titled “The future of SEO in an AI-powered world.” I wanted my opening line to be dramatic, so I wrote “The Google interface we know today will be gone in less than three years.” At the time, this line sounded outlandish. Could the world’s most popular website, with close to 2.5 billion daily users, just vanish? It’s a year later, and I find myself overwhelmingly turning to LLMs over Google for all kinds of information. In my case, the prediction of three years was an understatement. I suspect the same is true of many of you reading this. Is Google dead? Not quite. To paraphrase Mark Twain, news of Go…

As AI-generated answers take over the search landscape, understanding what gets cited – and why – has never been more critical. Explore citation data across leading AI engines, see how B2B and B2C intent shapes visibility, and learn actionable SEO tactics to help your brand get found. This analysis is powered by Rankscale.ai, a platform tracking AI query visibility across the web. Why care where AI results come from? Understanding how generative AI engines cite their sources is crucial for effective SEO today. Visibility in responses from ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews hinges on getting your brand mentioned in the cont…

It’s frustrating. You put time, energy, and a lot of hope into a webpage. But it just won’t rank. Your competitors’ pages are ranking well, even though (subjectively) they’re worse. Yours deserves to be top of Google. So, why isn’t it? Figuring out the levers to pull to get your content to the top of Google isn’t quick, but it can be done. Identifying the problem The key to identifying why your page isn’t ranking is to systematically rule out the other possibilities. For this, you’ll need data, industry context, and a methodical approach. Firstly, you need to verify if the page is not ranking at all versus not ranking well. This is key. If a pa…

Whether they’re digital natives or prefer traditional channels, today’s customers share one expectation: relevance, wherever and however they engage. But for organizations balancing privacy mandates, data governance, and legacy systems, delivering that kind of personalization at scale is no small feat. Join Adobe for Secure, Scalable Omnichannel Engagement—For the Most Demanding Industries and get an inside look at how leading organizations in complex industries are evolving from fragmented messaging to seamless, secure, and scalable cross-channel experiences. In this session, you’ll learn: How to architect personalized journeys across touchpoints without…

Google officially announced AI Max, a new suite of automation features for Search campaigns – and the PPC community is buzzing. While Google positions AI Max as an optional, performance-enhancing setting, many advertisers are parsing the announcement carefully, trying to separate the substance from the spin. From excitement about creative automation to concerns about keywordless targeting, reactions span the spectrum. What is AI Max? Google says: not a revolution, but an evolution First things first: what is AI Max? According to Jyll Saskin Gales, a former Googler who spoke directly with the product team: “AI Max for Search campaigns is a bundle o…

Jerry Dischler, the former Google executive who was in charge of Google Ads is now leaving the company right before his 20th year work anniversary. Dischler in November 2023 stepped down as the ad boss, during the height of the DOJ Google anti-trust case. What Dischler said. Jerry Dischler announced today that it would be his last day at Google. He posted a message on LinkedIn. He said, “After nearly 20 years, I’ve decided to leave Google, and today is my last day.” Here is the full post: After nearly 20 years, I’ve decided to leave Google, and today is my last day. Google is a remarkable company and I’m proud of the incredible things we’ve accomplished in …

Inside most enterprise organizations, SEO isn’t just battling Google’s AI Overviews. It’s battling its own structural weaknesses that are bleeding SEO revenue drier than Google’s AI would have otherwise. Yes, traffic is down. Yes, the economy is squeezing budgets. But SEO revenue doesn’t have to be down this much. Across the companies I work with, one pattern is clear: Internal execution gaps are quietly amplifying losses beyond what external market shifts actually dictate. Even in 2025 – the era of declining clicks, AI Overviews, and tougher competition – companies are leaking more SEO performance than the market alone would force them to lose…

There’s an ongoing debate in the PPC community about whether ad strength is a metric worth measuring or optimizing for. While Google states that ad strength doesn’t directly influence ad serving eligibility, it’s often treated as a proxy for ad quality – up to a point. Understanding ad strength Google’s ad strength metric is designed to guide advertisers in creating higher-quality ads. Google wants to show the best combination of headlines and descriptions for every user. This ensures high ad relevancy and more clicks (revenue) for Google. Ads are rated from Poor to Excellent, and Google offers recommendations on how to improve your score. G…

Content marketing is everywhere. We do keyword research, analyse markets, and publish landing pages and blog posts. The goal? To attract clicks, convert users, and climb the rankings. But what happens when that stops working? The internet is drowning in generic, AI-generated material. Search is becoming ambient, answer-led, and keyword-less. And search engines no longer need to crawl or rank your site to serve users. In fact, they’d often prefer not to. In these ‘solved query spaces’, answers are synthesised. Content is commodified. The old tactics don’t work anymore. If we want to reach and influence audiences, we need a new approach. We must st…

Google officially announced the deprecation of Structured Data Files (SDF) v7. The legacy version will be sunset on Nov. 4. Key changes post-deprecation. SDF v7 will no longer be supported; the default version will shift to v7.1 for all users. Any sdfdownloadtasks.create API requests referencing SDF_VERSION_7 will return a 400 error after November 4. Why we care. Advertisers and partners using SDF v7 must migrate to v7.1 or higher before the deadline to avoid service disruptions in Display & Video 360 workflows. What to do. Review the v7.1 release notes to understand differences from v7 and plan your migration. Need help? Use Google’s new Display & Vid…

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…