SEO Tools and Resources

Brand visibility is replacing rankings as the most important metric in SEO. AI search engines now answer questions directly – often without a single click to a website. If your brand isn’t mentioned in those AI answers, you’re invisible where it matters most. This isn’t about being No. 1 in blue links anymore. It’s about being the brand ChatGPT recommends, the company Perplexity cites, and the solution featured in Google’s AI Overview. So how do you measure and track that presence? Here’s a simple three-step framework to help – starting with your brand visibility score. (Copy this free spreadsheet to benchmark your current visibility.) …

Google is expanding access to incrementality testing, rolling out major updates designed to help advertisers of all sizes measure the true, causal impact of their ads — what’s driving results and what’s not. Driving accessibility and accuracy. Google has slashed the minimum spend for incrementality tests from around $100,000 to just $5,000, dramatically lowering the barrier for smaller advertisers to measure ROI with scientific precision. Marketers can now run controlled experiments to isolate the lift generated by their campaigns and optimize budgets accordingly. At the same time, Google says it has improved the methodology behind incrementality testing through n…

Google rolled out brand inclusion controls for Standard Shopping campaigns, a long-requested feature that gives advertisers direct control over which brands appear in their Shopping ads — without the need for complex workarounds. How it works: The new feature lets advertisers add or remove brand lists directly within the ad group targeting section of both Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns. Marketers can now define exactly which brands to include or exclude, preview the setup, and apply changes — all within the Google Ads interface. Why we care. Until now, brand targeting tools were only available in Performance Max and AI Max, leaving Standard Sh…

As generative AI becomes more embedded in search and content experiences, it’s also emerging as a new source of misinformation and reputational harm. False or misleading statements generated by AI chatbots are already prompting legal disputes – and raising fresh questions about liability, accuracy, and online reputation management. When AI becomes the source of defamation It’s unsurprising that AI has become a new source of defamation and online reputation damage. As an SEO and reputation expert witness, I’ve already been approached by litigants involved in cases where AI systems produced libelous statements. This is uncharted territory – and while so…

SEO is at an inflection point due to the rise of LLMs as search platforms. This has led to a lot of contradictory information about how we should approach LLMs and whether we should even continue to call their optimization “SEO.” As a consequence, I’ve been dedicating much of my day-to-day as an SEO consultant to clarifying countless questions about AI search, many of them coming directly from decision-makers. I’ve helped them establish AI search optimization roadmaps that make sense, are realistic, and are cost-effective based on each company’s context and current SEO process. My goal: to avoid fundamental AI search optimization mistakes triggered by misinformati…

Whether it’s Google signing Reddit to a deal to deepen its AI partnership, more traditional SEO results that have favored Reddit content, or Reddit’s share of ChatGPT references (down but still leading among social platforms), there are plenty of compelling reasons to prioritize Reddit in your organic strategy. That’s why it’s one of the first initiatives we tackle for new clients who aren’t yet building an organic Reddit presence. For clients already well underway with their core SEO strategies, we add it as a complementary layer. On its own, Reddit offers a strong pocket of qualified leads in discrete sub-verticals. Paired with the catnip-like appeal o…

By now, we’re all familiar with Google AI Overviews. Many queries you search on Google now surface responses through this quick and prominent search feature. But AI Overview results aren’t always reliable or accurate. Google’s algorithms can promote negative or misleading content, making online reputation management (ORM) difficult. Here’s how to stay on top of AI Overviews and your ORM – by removing, mitigating, or addressing negative content. How AI Overviews source information AI Overviews relies on a mix of data sources across Google and the open web, including: Google’s Knowledge Graph: The Knowledge Graph is Google’s structured database of …

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…

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 …

Last month, I asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini the same question about three of my clients: “Who is [Brand Name] and what do they do?” Two out of three got it wrong. Wrong services. Outdated office locations. One even suggested a competitor as a better alternative. Here’s what makes that more than a curious mistake. What today’s AI errors reveal about brand visibility AI-sourced traffic jumped 527% year-over-year from early 2024 to early 2025. While that growth is real, it’s growing from a very small base. Most sites still see AI referrals representing less than 1% of total traffic. But when half the AI-generated descriptions of your brand ar…

Search has moved far beyond blue links and basic ranking signals. People now discover information on Google, TikTok, Pinterest, Amazon, YouTube, and an expanding layer of generative AI platforms that synthesize answers from trusted sources. As SERPs shift toward rich results and AI summaries, users often get what they need without needing to click at all. In this environment, brand authority isn’t just tied to your domain. It spans platforms, formats, and the systems that learn from your content. Modern off-page SEO must support both search engines and the AI models that evaluate and surface your expertise. This off-page optimization guide breaks down …

Cloudflare has blocked 416 billion AI bot requests for customers since July 1, according to CEO Matthew Prince. To highlight Google’s massive edge in AI, Prince revealed that Google can see 3.2x more pages on the web than OpenAI. Why we care. Generative AI systems are consuming huge amounts of web content, and many publishers have no way to push back. Cloudflare’s numbers show how aggressively AI bots are scraping the web – and how uneven access is for the big AI companies. Driving the news. Cloudflare customers have been automatically blocking AI crawlers since the company launched its pay-per-crawl initiative July 1, Prince said yesterday at WIRED’s Big Intervie…

Google cites retailers only 4% of the time, while ChatGPT does it 36% of the time. That 9x gap means shoppers on each platform get steered in very different ways, according to new BrightEdge data. Why we care. Millions of shoppers now turn to AI for deals and gift ideas, but product discovery works differently on the two leading AI search platforms. Google leans on what people say, while ChatGPT focuses more on where you can buy it. What each AI prioritizes. Google AI Overviews cite YouTube reviews, Reddit threads, and editorial sites, while ChatGPT cite retail giants like Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Best Buy. Google AI Overviews prioritize: YouTube revi…

Google isn’t rewarding whoever buys the most ads or uploads the glossiest photos. It’s rewarding the business that matches what people expect in the moment. That’s why the old checklist approach to local SEO breaks down – it assumes every customer behaves the same. In other words, Google does play favorites, the “signal-fit” kind. Google’s ranking system isn’t swinging blindly; it’s tuned to intent, behavior, and category nuance. However, recent trends call that old assumption into question. A single formula doesn’t guide Google’s Local Pack – it’s shaped by how people actually search. The notion that a generic playbook can successfully deliver the …

One of the major things we talk about with large language models (LLMs) is content creation at scale, and it’s easy for that to become a crutch. We’re all time poor and looking for ways to make our lives easier – so what if you could use tools like Claude and ChatGPT to frame your processes in a way that humanizes your website work and eases your day, rather than taking the creativity out of it? This article tackles how to: Analyze customer feedback and questions at scale. Automate getting detailed and unique information from subject matter experts. Analyze competitors. These are all tasks we could do manually, and sometimes still might, but they’r…

Word count is not a ranking factor in itself, but it still plays a significant role in SEO. A minimum number of words helps search engines understand your topic, helps users understand your message, and supports content quality and relevance. The right length for your content depends on search intent, topic depth, competition, and purpose. In this guide, you will learn why word count matters, when length helps or hurts, and how to decide the right length for every page you publish. Table of contents What does word count mean for SEO? Why very short content often struggles What does Yoast SEO check when it comes to text length? How user intent determines ideal length…

For the past two years, we’ve been living in AI’s gold rush era. To borrow from Taylor Swift, think of it as the “Lover” phase where everything is shiny, new, and full of possibility. The behavior: Buy everything. The metric: Can it generate something cool? The vibe: Pure FOMO. But we’re entering a new era now. Call it the “Reputation” phase, which is darker, edgier, and entirely focused on receipts. A sign of this shift was in the headlines recently, blaring on about Microsoft lowering its AI sales targets. The hot takes rushed in to frame it as a disappointment, a slowdown, and even a sign that enterprise demand is cooling. They all misread the m…

Google has updated its JavaScript SEO basics documentation to clarify how Google’s crawler handles noindex tags in pages that use JavaScript. In short, if “you do want the page indexed, don’t use a noindex tag in the original page code,” Google wrote. What is new. Google updated this section to read: “When Google encounters the noindex tag, it may skip rendering and JavaScript execution, which means using JavaScript to change or remove the robots meta tag from noindex may not work as expected. If you do want the page indexed, don’t use a noindex tag in the original page code.” In the past, it read: “If Google encounters the noindex tag, it skips renderin…

Doing SEO well often means knowing what to focus on and when to do so. That is not always easy, especially when you are juggling content, updates, and day-to-day site management. That is why we are introducing a new SEO task list in the Yoast plugin. The Task List helps you improve your SEO step by step, directly inside your dashboard. It turns best practices into clear, actionable tasks, so you can make progress with confidence and without second-guessing your work. Why the SEO checklist matters: Turn SEO advice into clear actions Instead of vague recommendations or long documentation, the Task List shows you exactly what to do next. Each item fo…

We are navigating the “search everywhere” revolution – a disruptive shift driven by generative AI and large language models (LLMs) that is reshaping the relationship between brands, consumers, and search engines. For the last two decades, the digital economy ran on a simple exchange: content for clicks. With the rise of zero-click experiences, AI Overviews, and assistant-led research, that exchange is breaking down. AI now synthesizes answers directly on the SERP, often satisfying intent without a visit to a website. Platforms such as Gemini and ChatGPT are fundamentally changing how information is discovered. For enterprises, visibility increasingl…

Brand-agency partnerships look very different today than they did even a few years ago, and by 2026 that gap will only widen. Internal marketing teams are more sophisticated, digital channels are more specialized, and the role agencies play is no longer one-size-fits-all. As a result, the companies that get the most value from agency relationships aren’t always the biggest spenders. They’re the ones that are clear about what they need and what they don’t. That clarity starts with understanding the true role an agency should play inside your organization. Too many partnerships struggle because expectations and responsibilities were never properly al…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8AfAJUDFWY Search marketers are starting to build, not just optimize. Across SEO and PPC teams, vibe coding and AI-powered development tools are shrinking the gap between idea and execution – from weeks of developer queues to hours of hands-on experimentation. These tools don’t replace developers, but they do let search teams create and test interactive content on their own timelines. That matters because Google’s AI Overviews are pulling more answers directly into the SERP, leaving fewer clicks for brand websites. In a zero-click environment, the ability to build unique, useful, conversion-focused tools is becoming o…

The evolution of search continued to accelerate in 2025. Between GEO and AI-driven discovery, agents, and new optimization frameworks and tools, SEO experienced another huge year of change. As always, Search Engine Land helped you make sense of the advances – what was happening, what was coming next, and what truly mattered. Below are the 10 most-read SEO columns of 2025, written by our outstanding group of subject matter experts. 10. Will GEO replace SEO – or become part of it? GEO isn’t the death of SEO. It’s what happens when search becomes multi-platform, multi-modal, and powered by AI. (By Roslyn Ayers. Published Aug. 8.) 9. Meet llms.txt, a…

Most brands performing well in traditional local search fail to appear in results from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, according to SOCi’s newly released 2026 local visibility index. Also of note: business profile information was only about 68% accurate on ChatGPT and Perplexity, compared with 100% accuracy on Gemini, which is grounded in Google Maps. AI limits local visibility. Performance data from nearly 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands was analyzed to measure how often locations are surfaced or recommended by AI assistants. Turns out, AI platforms are far more selective than Google’s local results: 1.2% of locations were recommended…