SEO Tools and Resources

The AI resume has become a C-suite-level asset that reflects your entire digital strategy. To use it effectively, we first need to understand where AI is deploying it across the user journey. How AI has rewritten the user journey For years, our strategies were shaped by the inbound methodology. We built content around a user-driven path through awareness, consideration, and decision, with traditional SEO acting as the engine behind those moments. That journey has now been fundamentally reshaped. AI assistive engines – conversational systems like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity – are collapsing the funnel. They move users from discovery to dec…

Google announced the release of its latest AI model update, Gemini 3. “And now we’re introducing Gemini 3, our most intelligent model, that combines all of Gemini’s capabilities together so you can bring any idea to life,” Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai wrote. Gemini 3 is now being used in AI Mode in Search with more complex reasoning and new dynamic experiences. “This is the first time we are shipping Gemini in Search on day one,” Sundar Pichai said. AI Mode with Gemini 3. Google shared how AI Mode in Search is now using Gemini 3 to enable new generative UI experiences like immersive visual layouts and interactive tools and simulations, all generated completely on …

A new column called “Original Conversion Value” has started appearing inside Google Ads, giving advertisers a long-requested way to see the true, unadjusted value of their conversions. How it works. Google’s new formula strips everything back: Conversion Value – Rule Adjustments (value rules) – Lifecycle Goal Adjustments (e.g., NCA bonuses) = Original Conversion Value Why we care. For years, marketers have struggled to isolate real conversion value from Google’s layers of adjustments — including Conversion Value Rules and Lifecycle Goals (like New Customer Acquisition goals). Original Conversion value makes it easier to diagnose performance, compare data a…

I’ve straddled both the brand marketing and SEO industries for the past decade now. That dynamic has made it particularly interesting to watch how the concept of brand alignment has seeped into the search marketing vernacular. To quote my favorite baseball player, Yogi Berra, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” I’ve watched and I’ve observed how the conversation about brand alignment for LLM visibility has gone from “nice to have” to an absolute necessity. LLMs can expose a weak brand alignment while rewarding a strong brand alignment with increased visibility. With that, I want to kick things off by better explaining exactly what brand alignment look…

Every few years, SEO gets a shiny new acronym. Voice search. AMP. E-A-T. Each promised to rewrite the rules, and each eventually found its way into the same corporate graveyard of experiments and half-baked roadmaps. I know, because I bought in. For a year and a half, I buried myself in schema markup—building page-level knowledge graphs, connecting entities, mapping relationships until entire sites resembled semantic webs. It was meticulous, elegant, even beautiful in its own way. And it delivered nothing. Not because technical work doesn’t matter—SEO is inherently technical. The issue in enterprise is that Google is a black box. You can pour months into structured da…

Affiliate marketing drives billions in sales – and billions more in hidden losses. Brand bidding, ad hijacking, coupon abuse, and more subtle forms of affiliate fraud can quietly drain ROI and distort attribution. For performance leaders, the question isn’t if this happens, but how much you’re already losing. This article breaks down the most common types of affiliate marketing fraud and shows how modern monitoring tools like Bluepear help brands protect growth, reputation, and spend through smarter affiliate fraud detection strategies. Why affiliate programs are under threat Not all affiliate programs are created equal – and neither are their incentive…

LLM-driven discovery is reshaping how readers find and evaluate information, yet most teams still don’t know what actually gets cited by ChatGPT. While early theories suggest that structure, freshness, or authority signals are the primary drivers, the actual drivers have remained unclear. To bring more clarity, I audited 15 domains in September across ecommerce, cybersecurity and tech, healthcare, data analytics, education, and local business. Together, these sites generated nearly 2 million organic monthly sessions and 7,500 direct referral sessions from ChatGPT. The analysis focused on blog posts – one of the most controllable levers for non-branded vi…

Google is rolling out new Google Maps features that will show searchers more information about nearby businesses and events. Plus, Google is allowing reviewers to use nicknames instead of their real names when leaving a review. Know before you go. Google is rolling out the “know before you go” feature within Google Maps. This is a feature we saw being tested before, both in Search and in Maps, but now it is officially rolling out in Google Maps. When you search for places in Google Maps, Google will show you a new section with “know before you go” tips. Google will show you information like parking tips, secret menu items, the best way to book a reservation, and d…

Leading SEO platform Semrush – the company that acquired Search Engine Land, MarTech, and Third Door Media in October 2024 – is being acquired by software company Adobe. Adobe announced the acquisition today. The all-cash deal is valued at about $1.9 billion and is expected to close in the first half of 2026, pending regulatory and shareholder approvals. What Semrush is saying. Andrew Warden, Semrush’s chief marketing officer, shared this on LinkedIn: Big news: Semrush has agreed to be acquired by Adobe. It’s a winning combination: Adobe brings leading customer experience orchestration in the agentic AI era with its content supply chain and other solutions.…

Automation has shaped PPC for decades, and the landscape keeps shifting. I’ve seen that evolution firsthand, from helping build the first AdWords Editor to developing early Google Ads scripts and writing about automation layering. Now we’re entering another major transition. As AI changes how we search and get answers, it’s also transforming how automation itself gets built. And this time, the momentum isn’t coming from ad platforms like Google – it’s coming from AI companies like OpenAI. Until recently, AI mostly helped with human language tasks like writing ad copy, summaries, or reports. But the latest generation of LLMs can increasingly gene…

With AI Max for Search now widely available in beta, advertisers are debating everything from performance comparisons to how it plays with existing keyword structures. Google Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin is stepping in to clarify what AI Max is — and what it isn’t. What AI Max is designed to do. AI Max aims to unlock incremental conversions or conversion value — not replace or compete with your current keyword setup. It expands reach using broad match logic and keywordless matching (think DSA-style crawling of your landing pages). It pairs that with dynamic creative optimization, including text customization and Final URL expansion, to match intent more precisely…

Historically, Google Search has driven innovation by rewarding high-quality content with visibility and traffic. In the last article in this series, we talked about the risks of Google AI over-personalizing results and reinforcing filter bubbles. In this article, we’ll look at the opposite risk. If Google’s new AI results skew away from diversity and towards standardized results that favor big brands and consensus views, it could limit creativity and innovation and accelerate the commodification of the web. Some may find this concern naive because the internet is already very commodified, but historically, even small websites and businesses believed that they had…

For much of its history, marketing thrived on creativity, intuition and an almost magical ability to connect with audiences. Campaigns were conceived in brainstorming sessions, executed over weeks or months and celebrated (or dissected) once the results rolled in. Theodore Levitt’s “The Marketing Imagination” stays on most marketers’ bookcases alongside their team’s awards. Much of the technology we buy inside marketing is mostly isolated and gives fractal views of the customer, never a complete one and never of the customer in motion (with or without us). The one platform to solve it all has been the misnomer we have been hunting for but will never find. The promise…

Today’s consumers get pulled in a thousand different directions online: Scrolling YouTube Shorts. Tracking TikTok influencer content. Browsing Gmail promotions. Deciding whether the latest viral Facebook video is real or AI. And that’s all before lunch. Once, the path between intent and conversion was nearly a straight line. Now, in our new attention economy, constant advertising noise makes buying decisions much more complex. Most advertisers, however, have not adjusted to this new dynamic. They’re only focused on showing up when intent is obvious in search, missing entire audiences who never reach the search bar. Google’s Deman…

Google announced new branded queries filters are rolling out gradually within Google Search Console reporting. You can filter your performance reports by branded or non-branded queries and Google can show you the percentage of branded versus non-branded traffic driven to your site from Google Search. This was first introduced at the Google Search Central event in Tel Aviv today, so this news leaked from there first. What are branded queries. Google defined what it considers a branded query. Google wrote: A branded query is a query that includes your brand name (for example, Google), variations or misspellings of the brand name (for example, Gogle), and brand-…

Search performance is shifting across industries as AI systems increasingly answer first and link later, changing how brands earn visibility and attribution. You now have to think beyond rankings and focus on how your brand is interpreted and cited inside AI-generated results. Answer engine optimization (AEO) has moved from emerging concept to required practice. Structure, clarity, and credibility now function as core visibility signals that help large language models interpret, summarize, and confidently present content. The implications are universal, but not uniform. In retail, AEO reshapes product discovery. In healthcare, it tests accuracy …

Google DeepMind launched Nano Banana Pro, the next-gen version of its earlier Nano Banana image model and the image system powering Gemini 3 Pro. The upgrade brings sharper text rendering, richer world knowledge, higher consistency across edits, and more precise creative controls — all aimed at producing studio-quality visuals from even the roughest ideas. Why we care. Nano Banana Pro is built to help anyone — casual creators, designers, advertisers, developers, filmmakers — go from concept to polished visual with far more accuracy, reasoning, and control than previous models allowed. It can: Generate context-rich educational visuals, grounded in real-world d…

For much of its history, marketing thrived on creativity, intuition and an almost magical ability to connect with audiences. Campaigns were conceived in brainstorming sessions, executed over weeks or months and celebrated (or dissected) once the results rolled in. Theodore Levitt’s “The Marketing Imagination” stays on most marketers’ bookcases alongside their team’s awards. Much of the technology we buy inside marketing is mostly isolated and gives fractal views of the customer, never a complete one and never of the customer in motion (with or without us). The one platform to solve it all has been the misnomer we have been hunting for but will never find. The promise…

Google Ads expanded its “Political content” declaration, allowing advertisers to set a default political-ads preference at the account level — not just within individual campaigns. The feature quietly rolled out after Google introduced the campaign-level setting in August 2025. Why we care. The shift gives advertisers a simpler, more consistent way to comply with political-ad regulations, especially as new transparency requirements — including the EU’s TTPA rules that took effect in October 2025 — continue to ramp up. Instead of updating each campaign manually, advertisers can now define their political-ad intent once and apply it across the entire account. Ho…

Brands often invest in influencer and affiliate promotions but stop short of giving the content additional reach, assuming the creator’s audience is enough. Using paid marketing, adding it to your site, and sharing it across your channels isn’t doing their job for them. It’s a way to grow your company by using their brand recognition and strengthening the relationship. Yes, you pay an influencer an upfront fee, a commission, or send them a product in exchange for a promotion, but that doesn’t mean the relationship stops there. And that’s where amplification becomes a real advantage. It unlocks more value from the creator relationships you already have. …

In June, Fractl and Search Engine Land surveyed 2,000 consumers and uncovered a startling statistic: 82% find AI-powered search more helpful than traditional search. While the SEO industry panicked, thought leaders and snakeoil salesmen took to LinkedIn to lay claim to this new frontier of AI-driven brand visibility: “It’s called GEO!” “No, it’s AEO!” “Oh, we use AISO! Wait, I meant LLMO now!” …Or, maybe, it’s just effective SEO? Industry banter aside, we’ve entered a world where old-school search and AI-driven discovery coexist – and the terminology isn’t trivial. It’s the roadmap for how brands show up across fast-growing search platform…

Microsoft is alerting users that the Microsoft Advertising mobile app will be shut down in January 2026, ending mobile-based campaign management for advertisers. Why we care. Advertisers who rely on the mobile app for quick monitoring or urgent adjustments will need to shift workflows to the Microsoft Advertising web interface, the only remaining place to manage campaigns after the app is removed. What’s changing: The app has been removed form both the Apple App store and Google Play. It will be retired entirely in January 2026, users will lose access to campaign management through the app, and Microsoft is directing advertisers to the web UI, which supports…

Jonathon Heard, Industry Head, Insurance at Google, spoke at Simply Business headquarters in London yesterday and told the audience that Google Search will soon route complex queries entered into the Google Search box directly into AI Mode, bypassing Google Search completely. Plus, he also said that Google is indeed working on breaking out better reporting in Google Search Console for AI Mode and AI Overviews. Bypassing Google Search. Jonathon Heard said, “with Gemini 3, we’re gonna auto route complex queries through to AI mode automatically. So they’re live in the US at the minute they’re being tested.” An audience member then asked Jonathon Heard, “When you …

Headlines predicting another “AI winter” are beginning to emerge, and the numbers back the skepticism. MIT reports that while 80% of organizations have piloted GenAI and 40% report deployment, only 5% have reached scale, with seven of nine sectors showing no structural change. McKinsey finds the same disconnect: 36% of executives report no revenue impact, only 19% say revenues have grown more than 5%, and 87% admit growth is still years away. Adoption is everywhere, but impact is almost nowhere. But those headlines and numbers miss what’s happening inside enterprises right now. SEO leaders are being tapped to guide GEO—generative engine optimization. Not because we’re…

One of the most energetic conversations around AI has been what I’ll call “AI hype meets AI reality.” Tools such as Semush One and its Enterprise AIO tool came onto the market and offered something we could not live without: The data on what was happening inside LLMs. How many citations were we capturing? How many mentions were our brands gobbling up? This data became, and still is, an incredible novelty. But with the data came questions like “What’s the ROI here?” and “How do I interpret this data and integrate it into my team’s actual marketing strategy?” It’s clear the data provided by these tools is very valuable and very intriguing, but what do you do with …