SEO Tools and Resources

Custom annotations are finally live within Google Search Console’s performance reports. You can now annotate reports directly within Search Console to avoid forgetting important key events; such as coding changes, algorithm updates, bugs on your website or more. What are custom annotations. Google explained that custom annotations are “Notes you create yourself to mark important events specific to your property, such as when you launch a new feature, or fix a bug on your website.” Google began testing this feature back in May 2025 and it is now live. What they look like. Here is a screenshot of a custom annotation in Search Console: How does it work. Y…

Google is preparing a new Search bidding model called Journey Aware Bidding, designed to factor in the entire customer journey — not just the final biddable conversion — to improve prediction accuracy and campaign performance. How it works: Journey Aware Bidding learns from your primary conversion goal plus additional, non-biddable journey stages. Advertisers who fully track and properly categorize each step of their purchase funnel stand to benefit the most. Google recommends mapping the entire journey — from lead submission to final purchase — and labeling all touchpoints as conversions within standard goals. Why we care. Performance advertisers h…

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…

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…

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 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…

Ranking No. 1 is still an accomplishment, but by now, most SEO professionals understand that it doesn’t mean what it once did. Search in 2026 is messy, multi-surface, and sometimes more passive than active: AI: AI Overviews and answer engines. Social: YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest as search platforms. Forums and UGC: Reddit, Quora, and UGC blended straight into results. SERP features: People Also Ask, What People Are Saying, etc. Jim Yu, Founder and CEO of BrightEdge, shared with me: “In the early days of search, success was simple: earn rankings, get clicks, grow traffic. But search has evolved through quick answers, featured snippets, maps, …

The latest benchmark results reveal a surprising drop in SEO accuracy from top AI models. TL;DR: The latest flagship AI models (Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro) have statistically regressed in performance for standard SEO tasks, showing a ~9% drop in accuracy compared to previous versions. This isn’t a glitch – it’s a feature of how models are now optimized for deep reasoning and “agentic” workflows rather than “one-shot” answers. To survive this shift, organizations must stop relying on raw prompts and move to “contextual containers” (Custom GPTs, Gems, Projects). The ‘newer = better’ myth is dead Last year, the narrative was linear: wait for the n…

If it feels like the entire internet woke up one day and decided to start every sentence with “AI,” you’re not wrong. Marketers are being hit with a daily wave of LinkedIn thought leaders, half-baked prompt hacks, and promises that ChatGPT is either going to 10x your productivity or take your job entirely. And in the middle of all this? You (the digital marketer). Marketers are trying to figure out if this is just another buzzword cycle or the beginning of a complete rewrite of how we do content, SEO, PPC, reporting, and, well, everything. So let’s break it down. Consider this your AI starting guide, written for marketers who are tired of needing a young…

Google is quietly testing a new way to make Shopping ads feel more local. Select ads using local inventory feeds now display the merchant’s city or town directly above the product title — think “London” or “Tonbridge” — giving shoppers a clearer sense of where the store is based. Why we care. The new location labels make Shopping ads feel more local and trustworthy, helping nearby retailers stand out in crowded results. Clear city or town indicators can increase click-through rates and drive more in-store visits from shoppers who prefer buying close to home. It also gives merchants using local inventory feeds a competitive edge by highlighting proximity without n…

With generative AI tools attracting hundreds of millions of users and AI-enhanced results appearing in more search experiences, the way people discover brands is changing. Traditional SEO metrics alone no longer capture this full picture. Welcome to the era of generative engine optimization (GEO). If you aren’t tracking your brand’s visibility across AI search engines, you’re flying blind. The AI search revolution is already here The numbers are striking: 58% of consumers have replaced traditional search engines with generative AI tools for product recommendations, according to Capgemini research. Traditional organic search traffic is expected to decli…

We’ve established the AI resume as the new C-suite-level asset that defines your brand at the bottom of the funnel, and we’ve mapped the strategic landscape that shows how it operates across explicit, implicit, and ambient research modes. So, how do you build this asset to thrive in a three-part environment? The answer is shifting from ranking in search results to the discipline of brand-focused algorithmic education – a multi-speed strategy aligned with the trio of technologies powering all modern recommendation engines. The digital marketing ecosystem has been reshaped by AI assistive engines – platforms like Google AI, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot that no…

Google recently rolled out “read more” links in Google search results, which appear at the end of the snippet’s description. When you click on the read more link, you are anchored down to a specific portion of the web page that you clicked on. Not all search result snippets include these read more links, but many do. What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of this in action, but you can probably replicate it for most of your queries now: Google was testing this, or variations of this, back in July and now it seems to have been rolled out. Why we care. These read more links do add an additional eye-catching link to the search result snippets. Hopeful…

Pages that rank for Google’s AI Overview “fan-out” queries are much more likely to be cited than those that rank only for the main search query, according to data from Surfer SEO. An analysis of 10,000 keywords found a strong correlation (Spearman 0.77) between how many fan-out queries a page ranks for and its likelihood of being cited in Google’s AI Overviews. By the numbers. Pages ranking for fan-out queries are 161% more likely to be cited than pages ranking only for the main query. Also: 76% of the sampled keywords triggered AI Overviews. 33,000 fan-out queries were extracted using Gemini. Pages ranking for both the main query and at least one fan-…

OpenAI is laying the groundwork for an advertising business, signaling a potential shift in how ChatGPT and other products could be monetized beyond subscriptions and enterprise deals. What’s happening. According to reporting from The Information, OpenAI has begun exploring ad formats and partnerships, with early discussions pointing toward ads that could appear within or alongside AI-generated responses. The effort is still in its early stages, but internal conversations suggest ads are becoming a more serious part of OpenAI’s long-term revenue strategy. Why we care. OpenAI is exploring ads inside AI-generated responses, creating a new, highly contextual channel …

Limited search volume doesn’t mean limited opportunity. Your entire target market might only search for your solution a few hundred times per month. High-volume advertisers can test 50 headline variations in a week, while you’re still waiting for your tenth conversion of the quarter. Most niche advertisers try to use the same strategies that work for high-volume accounts. That’s a mistake. Google’s automation needs data, and niche markets don’t generate enough searches to feed it. This mismatch either kills performance or prevents results altogether. This guide shows what actually works when search volume is low and conversion timelines stretch acros…

Google’s Danny Sullivan, the former Search Liaison, said not to create bite-sized chunks of your content because you think Google’s AI results and other LLMs like that type of content. He said, “we don’t want you to do that” and that he spoke with Google engineers about it and they said the same thing – don’t do it for LLMs. More details. Danny Sullivan said on the Search Off the Record podcast that was published yesterday: “One of the things I keep seeing over and over in some of the advice and guidance and people are trying to figure out what do we do with the LLMs or whatever, is that turn your content into bite-sized chunks, because LLMs like things that are …

The European Commission has formally opened new proceedings to spell out how Google must share key Android features and Google Search data with rivals under the Digital Markets Act. The Commission on Tuesday opened two formal “specification proceedings” to guide how Google must comply with key DMA obligations, effectively turning regulatory dialogue into a structured process with defined outcomes. Why we care. The European Commission is escalating its oversight of Google under the Digital Markets Act, with moves that could reshape competition in mobile AI and search — and limit how much advantage Google can extract from its own platforms. If Google is required to …

Google will now jump you directly into AI Mode when you do a follow-up question from AI Overviews within Google Search. This makes the “transition to a conversation even more seamless,” Robby Stein, VP of Product, Google Search wrote. Plus, Google AI Overviews are powered by Gemini 3 by default, globally. AI Overviews jumping to AI Mode. We covered when Google was officially testing this back in December and also before Google confirmed the test in October 2025. The ask a follow-up question within the Google Search AI Overviews will jump you into a conversation directly in AI Mode. Google said this is about “making the transition to a conversation even more se…

U.S. Google searchers are searching far less than a year ago, according to a new Datos/SparkToro report. The data suggests Google isn’t losing users — it’s losing repeat searches. Why we care. Google still dominates search, but it’s changing in significant ways. Fewer searches per user means fewer opportunities for clicks, ads, and traffic — even if total search volume looks steady. By the numbers. Google desktop searches per user fell nearly 20% year over year, based on clickstream data from tens of millions of U.S. users. That drop stands in sharp contrast to Europe, where searches per user declined by just 2% to 3%. Even with fewer searches per person,…

Google rolled out a small but practical update to Performance Max that makes reviewing creatives faster and less clunky. What’s new. Advertisers can now click directly on images or videos inside the Asset Groups table to instantly preview how ads will appear across different Performance Max placements — without leaving the page. Why we care. Previously, checking creative previews meant digging into separate views or settings. This change keeps advertisers in the workflow, cutting down friction during creative QA and iteration. Between the lines. Performance Max is often criticized for limited transparency, so even incremental UI improvements that surface c…

On episode 339 of PPC Live The Podcast, I speak to Kirk Williams, a long-time PPC professional who’s been in the industry since 2009. Kirk is the founder of Zato, a specialist PPC micro-agency, and the author of Ponderings of a PPC Professional and Stop the Scale. He’s also a familiar face on the global conference circuit, speaking at events like BrightonSEO, SMX, HeroConf, and more. The big f-Up: Taking on the wrong clients Kirk’s biggest mistake wasn’t a platform error or a bad bid — it was taking on clients who weren’t a good fit. He explains that these decisions often came during moments of pressure: wanting to grow quickly, dealing with client churn, or na…

One of the biggest reasons new advertisers end up in underperforming Performance Max campaigns is simple: they followed Google’s advice. Google Ads reps are often well-meaning and, in many cases, genuinely helpful at a surface level. But it’s critical for advertisers – especially new ones – to understand who those reps work for, how they’re incentivized, and what their recommendations are actually optimized for. Before defaulting to Google’s newest recommendation, it’s worth taking a step back to understand why the “shiny new toy” isn’t always the right move – and how advertisers can better advocate for strategies that serve their business, not just the platf…

Google has released the February 2026 Discover core update, this is a core update specific to how Google surfaces content within Google Discover. Google wrote, “This is a broad update to our systems that surface articles in Discover.” This is first rolling out to English language users in the US, and will expand it to all countries and languages in the months ahead, Google said. What is expected. Google said the Discover update will improve the Google Discover “experience in a few key ways,” including: Showing users more locally relevant content from websites based in their country Reducing sensational content and clickbait in Discover Showing more i…