SEO Tools and Resources

In 1998, submitting a website to search engines was manual, methodical, and genuinely tedious. I remember 17 of them: AltaVista, Yahoo Directory, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, HotBot, Northern Light, Ask Jeeves, DMOZ, Snap, LookSmart, GoTo.com, AllTheWeb, Inktomi, iWon, and About.com. Each had its own form, process, and wait time, and its own quiet judgment about whether your URL was worth including. We submitted manually, 18,000 pages in all. Yawn. Google was barely a year old when we were doing this. But they were already building the thing that would make submission irrelevant. PageRank meant Google followed links, and a site that other sites linke…

OpenAI now allows users of ChatGPT to share their device location so that ChatGPT can know more precisely where the user is and serve better answers and results based on that location. The feature is called location sharing, OpenAI wrote, “Sharing your device location is completely optional and off until you choose to enable it. You can update device location sharing in Settings > Data Controls at any time.” What it does. If ChatGPT knows your location, it can return better local results. OpenAI wrote: “Precise location means ChatGPT can use your device’s specific location, such as an exact address, to provide more tailored results.” “For example, if y…

Google Business Profile (GBP) may be getting shoved down the SERPs by ads and AI Overviews more than ever, but it’s still a top source of inbound leads for local businesses — and one of the fastest ways to improve rankings with simple fixes. Here’s a five-step audit to find and fix the gaps most businesses miss. 1. Evaluate Google review velocity and recency It’s a common misconception that the business with the most Google reviews wins in Google Maps ranking. While a high review count provides social proof, Google’s algorithm has more of a “what have you done for me lately?” attitude. The number of reviews you get a month, and how recent your last review w…

AI search engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity are changing how consumers discover and purchase products online. If your product pages aren’t optimized for these AI assistants, you could be missing out on a growing source of traffic and revenue. The challenge? AI assistants don’t evaluate product pages in the same way traditional search engines do. They need to fully understand your products so they can confidently recommend them to different users with different needs. To help you assess how well your product pages are optimized for AI search, here’s a simple scorecard covering the six most important factors. 1. Product specifications Does…

You’ve worked hard to build your product catalog. The last thing you want is AI tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini describing your products inaccurately to potential customers. AI tools don’t browse your whole store the way a search engine does. They grab what they can find, quickly, and fill in the gaps. For a store with a large catalog, that means incomplete answers, outdated information, or worse, sending shoppers to a competitor. The new llms.txt feature, available in Yoast SEO for Shopify bridges that gap. What does it actually do? It creates a file that tells AI tools which parts of your store matter most: your top products, your collections, you…

Google removed a Search Engine Land article (Report: Clickout Media turned news sites into AI gambling hubs, published March 26) from its search results after a copyright complaint (that appears, to us, to be entirely false). Meanwhile, a similar DMCA filing led to the takedown of the original Press Gazette investigation. What happened. A DMCA notice filed March 27 claimed Search Engine Land copied content “word for word” and used proprietary images. The complaint led Google to begin removing the article from search results globally. The notice identifies the complainant as “US Webspam,” with no clear public attribution. The context. The removed article re…

Microsoft Advertising now allows e-commerce merchants to edit their Merchant Center store name and domain directly within the platform — no support ticket required. Why we care. Store details like names and URLs change as businesses rebrand or restructure. Previously, updating these required manual intervention. Self-serve control reduces friction and keeps campaigns running more smoothly during transitions. How it works — the details: Store name changes go through editorial review before going live. During review, ads keep running under the existing approved name — so there’s no interruption to campaigns. Domain/URL changes require merchants to verify…

Reddit today opened its Pro publishing tools to all publishers, removing the waitlist and offering free access in a public beta to expand distribution and engagement. Why we care. Reddit Pro gives you a centralized tool to track where your content spreads, streamline posting, and find the right communities. It transforms Reddit from a manual posting exercise into a structured distribution channel. The details. You can now sign up for Reddit Pro, verify your domain (typically within three business days), and access the Links tab. With Reddit Pro, you can: Track where your content is shared across Reddit. Auto-import articles via RSS for quick posting. Ge…

A bug in Google Ads Editor is causing structured snippet extensions copied between accounts to remain unintentionally linked. When advertisers change the language in one account, it can automatically update the same extension in another. Why we care. This bug creates hidden inconsistencies for advertisers managing multi-market campaigns, especially when different languages are required across accounts. What advertisers are seeing. The issue surfaced while managing Czech and Slovak e-commerce accounts by digital marketer Marcin Wsół. Changing the snippet language in one account triggered the same change in the other. The extensions appear separate but behave a…

Google says a new compression algorithm, called TurboQuant, can compress and search massive AI data sets with near-zero indexing time, potentially removing one of the biggest speed limits in modern search systems. What it is. TurboQuant is a way to shrink and organize the data that powers AI and search without losing accuracy. It reduces memory use while keeping results precise and cuts the time to build searchable AI indexes to “virtually zero,” according to the research paper. How it works. Modern search converts content into vectors (lists of numbers that represent meaning). Similar ideas sit close together in this numeric space, and search finds the closest ma…

In long sales cycles, a lot of what happens after lead submission involves people. When you optimize campaigns to final sales, you’re teaching the ad platform to respond to how well the sales team performed that month rather than lead quality, and that’s a problem no amount of campaign changes will fix. The common advice is to “optimize the full funnel” (i.e., track media spend to revenue, optimize campaigns to sales, etc.). But beyond lead capture, most of what drives sales has little to do with your paid media. It’s about who’s on the sales team, how busy they are, and dozens of other factors you can’t influence through targeting or creative. When your sales tea…

AI search is changing how visibility works. Users are getting direct answers instead of clicking links, which means fewer chances to drive traffic. In this shift, AI citations are becoming the new gatekeepers, deciding which sources get featured in answers. Over the past year, search has moved from ranking pages to selecting sources, pushing us from traditional SEO toward AI-driven visibility. In this article, we’ll explain what AI citations are, how they work, and how you can earn them. Table of contents What are AI citations? How AI citations impact brand credibility How AI citations work: a complete breakdown Strategies to get cited by AI models Tracking AI b…

The OpenAI GPT Store launched in January 2024 with more than 3 million custom GPTs. Ask any team how many they still use, and the answer is usually zero or one. Most business GPTs fail because they’re built like novelties rather than tools. They’re too broad, under-tested, and launched without a strategy, so they never become part of a team’s workflow. I’ve built and audited 12+ custom GPTs across marketing, SEO, and sales teams. The pattern is consistent: a small number get used daily, while most collect dust. Here’s how to build GPTs that do — from validating the right use case to structuring, testing, and launching in a way that drives real adoption. …

There’s no such thing as “too much information” in AI search. The more detail you provide, the less likely your business is to be replaced by third-party sources — or left out entirely. With the rise of AI search, we know users want answers, and they want them fast. Google Maps has Know before you go and Ask Maps about this place (not to be confused with Ask Maps, the new conversational “AI Mode” in Google Maps), both AI features that let users easily find information about a place without visiting their website or social media. Merchant Center added a new feature, Business Agent, that allows shoppers to chat with brands. Business Agent pulls from the business’s p…

AI search often fails to identify which Spanish-speaking market it’s serving. Instead, it blends regional terminology, legal frameworks, and commercial context into a single response, creating answers that don’t map to any real market. The result is answers that mix multiple countries into something no user can actually use. This is the “Global Spanish” problem. How AI turns ‘correct’ Spanish into useless answers Ask a chatbot in Spanish how to file your taxes — cómo puedo declarar impuestos — and watch what happens. The response is grammatically perfect, well structured, and seemingly helpful. Then, in a single bullet point, it casually lists “RFC, NIF, SS…

Heidi Sturrock, a paid search consultant with 24 years of industry experience, joined me on a recent episode of PPC Live The Podcast. The episode covers a broad match mistake with an unexpected silver lining, and Heidi’s experience testing AI Max across 50+ accounts. The broad match mistake — and the unexpected silver lining Early in her career, Heidi ran a competitor conquest campaign for a high-spending B2B SaaS client using broad match — without adding negative keywords — and launched it on a Friday with a large daily budget. Over the weekend, the client’s call centre was flooded with angry calls from the competitor’s customers looking for refunds and tech suppo…

Advertisers can now generate short videos directly inside Google Ads using Veo, Google’s most advanced generative video model — no video production required. How it works. Upload up to three static images into Asset Studio and Veo generates videos up to 10 seconds long with natural motion, designed specifically for YouTube formats and audiences. These can then be turned into ready-to-serve ads using customisable templates. What else it can do. Combined with Nano Banana, advertisers can adapt creatives further — swapping backgrounds, adjusting messaging, and tailoring content to specific audience interests. The bigger picture. This follows Google’s earlier …

Google is testing AI-generated summaries in YouTube feeds, replacing video titles with auto-written synopses. Some YouTube users are seeing video titles replaced by AI-generated summaries in the Android app. Reports on Reddit showed title-less video cards with collapsible summary boxes instead. The details. Video thumbnails remain, but titles are missing in some cases. AI summaries appear in expandable text boxes beneath each video. Users must tap to expand summaries to understand the content. The test appears limited to YouTube on Android. Why we care. This further abstracts creator metadata and reduces control over how your YouTube content appears…

We’ve all seen the charts going viral on LinkedIn. They’re everywhere at this point. Multiple industry studies, even this research from Semrush, confirm that Wikipedia and Reddit are the top-cited domains across major LLM platforms — and CMOs are running with this data. The response is predictable: Just search for any bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) software query, and you’ll find Reddit threads in the top-ranking positions. This is exactly why the market is currently flooded with “Reddit SEO” agencies: Just stop. Taking this macro context — or a few isolated, high-ranking SERPs — and pivoting your entire GEO strategy toward Reddit or Wikipedia is a massive s…

Just six weeks after launching its ad pilot, OpenAI has hit a significant milestone — and the platform is still in its early stages of rollout. The numbers. Over $100 million in annualized ad revenue, generated from less than 20% of eligible US free and Go tier users seeing ads daily Around 85% of Free and Go users are eligible to see ads — meaning the current revenue represents a fraction of the platform’s eventual ad capacity More than 600 advertisers are now on the platform What’s coming next. Self-serve advertiser access is on track to launch in April Geographic expansion into Canada, Australia, and New Zealand is being explored OpenAI ha…

OpenAI have been pumping out the ads ads for free-tier ChatGPT users in the US for over a month now, and early testing suggests they’re more frequent and more targeted than many users might expect. How often they appear. In a test of 500 questions across the mobile app, roughly one in five questions in a new conversation thread triggered an ad at the bottom of ChatGPT’s response — always as a website link button, always tailored to the topic of the question. What kind of ads appeared. The range was broad — dog food, hotel bookings, productivity software, cruise vacations, streaming services, corporate credit cards, AI coding tools, and basketball tickets, among ot…

You know SEO improves traffic, authority, and trust. What we don’t talk about enough is how a strong SEO foundation can help other channels, including PPC. This practical case study will show you how performance marketing scales in a high-consideration B2B medical device market and how getting SEO fundamentals firmly in place enables paid media to deliver at scale. B2B medical device marketing breaks most performance playbooks Marketing a premium pelvic floor chair has little in common with selling SaaS tools or consumer products. This is a high-ticket medical device with a long sales cycle and a strong reliance on medical expertise. Buyers include doctor…

If your entire Google Ads strategy consists of targeting brand and non-brand keywords, you’re limiting growth. If performance is declining, it’s not the platform — it’s the strategy. People don’t discover you through non-brand search. They research on Reddit, ChatGPT, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. They watch demos, read testimonials, and learn about your brand long before they ever search for it. If you have a complex sales process and a long customer journey, this shift is critical and requires a different approach. Here’s what you need to know to make this work in B2B. AI-forward campaigns: A cost-effective growth gold mine Google has been developing m…

A new version of the Google Ads API is out, bringing a handful of targeted updates across video, app campaigns, and audience planning tools. Key changes in this release. A new VideoEnhancement resource that surfaces whether a video ad is Google-generated or advertiser-provided — giving developers clearer visibility into auto-enhanced creative A new AppTopCombinationView resource providing read-only insights into top-performing asset combinations in App campaigns The ability to disable the hotel feed in Demand Gen campaigns via HotelSettingInfo.disable_hotel_setting A new conversion metric for indirect first in-app installs across Campaign, Customer, and …

Refreshing creatives for every seasonal moment just got significantly faster — Google has quietly launched Asset Group Theming inside Performance Max, letting advertisers apply seasonal themes to existing asset groups without rebuilding from scratch. How it works. Advertisers can clone a high-performing asset group and apply a theme — Google then generates themed image variations and suggests aligned headlines and descriptions, while leaving the original asset group completely untouched for safe testing. Available themes cover. Promotional: Sale, Studio/Editorial Seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall Cultural moments: Christmas, Black Friday/Cyber M…