SEO Tools and Resources

Google is pushing more Demand Gen features (boosting shoppable and travel ads) into general availability, expanding its role as a full-funnel performance channel that blends discovery, video, and commerce across YouTube and Google surfaces. What’s new: Shoppable CTV via Demand Gen is now live, letting viewers browse and buy products directly from YouTube ads on connected TVs. Attributed Branded Searches are available for Demand Gen, giving advertisers visibility into how campaigns drive brand search activity across Google and YouTube (activation required via a Google rep). Travel Feeds allow advertisers to connect Hotel Center feeds to create dyna…

Google is rolling out Campaign Mix Experiments (beta), a new testing framework that lets advertisers experiment across multiple campaign types, budgets, and settings within a single, unified experiment. How it works: Advertisers can create up to five experiment arms, each containing a different mix of campaigns. Campaigns can appear in multiple arms, with traffic split between them. Experiments support Search, Performance Max, Shopping, Demand Gen, Video, and App campaigns (excluding Hotels). Traffic splits can be customized (minimum 1%), with results normalized to the lowest split for fair comparison. What you can test: Budget allocation across…

Google’s head of Search warned a federal court that forcing the company to share its search index, ranking data, and live results with competitors would cause “immediate and irreparable harm” to Google, its users, and the open web. The warning appears in a filed affidavit from Elizabeth Reid, Google’s vice president and head of Search, submitted with Google’s motion to pause key antitrust remedies while it appeals the final judgment in the DOJ search monopoly case. The filing spells out what Google sees as its most sensitive Search assets and why sharing them would expose proprietary systems, enable reverse engineering, and fuel spam. Disclosure of Google’s we…

When Meta launched advertising nearly two decades ago, performance was driven by manual inputs – targeting rules, account structure, and incremental optimization. Success depended on carefully defined audiences, granular budget control, and frequent testing. That operating model eroded over time as privacy changes and signal loss made deterministic targeting less reliable. Over the last two years, Meta responded by fundamentally rebuilding its advertising platform around AI. That rebuild began with Andromeda, a personalized ads retrieval engine, and expanded into Meta’s Generative Ads Recommendation Model (GEM). Together, these systems now determine …

The January 2026 SEO Update by Yoast is part of our monthly webinar series covering the latest developments in search and AI. In each session, we review the most important news from the past month and explore what it means for your search strategy. Hosted by Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, this month’s update looks at key industry shifts and practical takeaways for staying competitive. Below is a recap of the topics discussed and what they mean for your strategy. Here’s the recap video on YouTube Watch the full recap on YouTube to hear Carolyn and Alex dive deeper into these topics, answer audience questions, and provide additional examples of how these changes could…

Many search teams are seeing better rankings, more visibility, increased traffic, and more leads. Yet feedback on pipeline, revenue, and sales outcomes isn’t showing the same positive results. When SEO KPIs are green and graphs are up and to the right, business outcomes don’t always reflect the same success. Why strong search performance doesn’t translate to business outcomes Search performance can look healthy on the surface while breaking down in places search teams don’t own or fully see. It’s tempting to turn immediately to attribution models, data quality, or KPI definitions. Ultimately, the issue is often how performance breaks down after th…

For a long time, SEO had the simplest math in marketing: Rank higher → Get more traffic → Fill the sales pipeline To the dissatisfaction of marketing executives, that linear world is breaking fast. Between AI Overviews, zero-click SERPs, and users getting answers directly from LLMs, the old “rank to get traffic and leads” equation is failing. Today, holding a top keyword position often yields significantly fewer clicks than it did just two years ago. This has forced many uncomfortable conversations in boardrooms. CMOs and CEOs are looking at traffic dashboards and asking tough questions, especially: “If traffic is down… how do we know SEO is act…

We analyzed nearly two million LLM sessions across nine industries from January through December 2025. We started with a simple assumption: ChatGPT dominates, usage patterns are uniform, and the volume is small and inconsequential. The data proved us wrong. ChatGPT commands 84.1% of trackable AI discovery traffic, but it functions primarily as the default tool for broad-market discovery. That reality changes the strategy. Brands can no longer rely on a single, discovery-first approach. You need a multi-platform strategy that aligns with how users expect to be productive at different moments. Success now depends on knowing which platforms actively enable u…

Innovations are coming at marketers and consumers faster than before, raising the question: Are we actually ready for the agentic web? To answer that question, it’s important to unpack a few supporting ones: What’s the agentic web? How can the agentic web be used? What are the pros and cons of the agentic web? It’s important to note that this article isn’t a mandate for AI skeptics to abandon the rational questions they have about the agentic web. Nor is it intended to place any judgment on how you, as a consumer or professional, engage with the agentic web. With thoughts and feelings so divided on the agentic web, this article aims to provi…

Google Ads has quietly rolled out multi-party approval, a security feature that requires a second administrator to approve certain high-risk account actions. These include adding or removing users and changing user roles. Why we care. As ad accounts grow larger — and more valuable — access control has become a bigger risk. A single unauthorized, malicious or accidental account change can disrupt campaigns, access, and billing in minutes. Multi-party approval reduces that risk by requiring a second admin sign-off on high-impact actions, adding protection without changing day-to-day campaign management. For agencies and large teams especially, it helps prevent cost…

As AI-driven bidding and automation transform paid media, first-party data has become the most powerful lever advertisers control. In this conversation with Search Engine Land, Julie Warneke, founder and CEO of Found Search Marketing, explained why first-party data now underpins profitable advertising — no matter how Google’s position on third-party cookies evolves. What first-party data really is — and isn’t First-party data is customer information that an advertiser owns directly, usually housed in a CRM. It includes: Lead details. Purchase history. Revenue. Customer value collected through websites, forms, or physical locations. It doesn’…

Perplexity is abandoning advertising, for now at least. The company believes sponsored placements — even labeled ones — risk undermining the trust on which its AI answer engine depends. Perplexity phased out the ads it began testing in 2024 and has no plans to bring them back, the Financial Times reported. The AI search company could revisit advertising or “never ever need to do ads,” the report said. Why we care. If Perplexity remains ad-free, brands lose paid access to a fast-growing audience. The company previously reported that it gets 780 million monthly queries. With sponsored placements gone, brands have no way to get visibility inside Perplexity’s answ…

OpenAI is updating its privacy policy with new details on ads, data usage and upcoming features across its products, including ChatGPT. The update was shared with ChatGPT users and outlines how advertising will work inside ChatGPT — and what data advertisers can and cannot access. Why we care. OpenAI’s update makes it clear that user privacy is a top priority: personal chats, histories, and details are never shared with advertisers. Ads can still be personalized using anonymized engagement signals, meaning brands can reach relevant audiences without compromising sensitive data. This approach lets advertisers measure performance safely while building trust…

Google will be removing more search features in the coming months, but it has not disclosed the full list of which features. It appears that Google will do away with some of the currently supported structured data types used for rich results in Google Search, plus some search features. This comes after Google dropped support for several search features back in June, but then Google documented which ones those were. Later, Google confirmed the removal of those structured data types. What Google said. John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google, wrote: “We’re beginning to phase these lesser-used features out. “This update will simplify the page and improve the …

You’ve probably heard the saying: Fast, cheap, or good – pick two. The concept goes something like this: If you want something fast and cheap, don’t expect it to be good. If you want it good and fast, it’s going to cost more. And if you want it good and affordable, well, you’ll need to give it time. It’s a simple way to explain how tradeoffs work in projects. In SEO, these tradeoffs are especially important to understand because you’re often creating problems that will cost more to fix later. This article looks at variations of this project management concept and how it applies to SEO. Then I’ll explain why a quality-first approach l…

As shopping becomes more visually driven, imagery plays a central role in how people evaluate products. Images and videos can unfurl complex stories in an instant, making them powerful tools for communication. In ecommerce, they function as decision tools. Generative search systems extract objects, embedded text, composition, and style to infer use cases and brand fit, then LLMs surface the assets that best answer a shopper’s question. Each visual becomes structured data that removes a purchase objection, increasing discoverability in multimodal search contexts where customers take a photo or upload a screenshot to ask about it. Visual search i…

SEO never stands still, and neither do we here at Yoast. In our November 2025 edition of the SEO Update by Yoast, our principal SEOs, Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, broke down the latest shifts in search, structured data, and AI. Whether you’re running an e-commerce store, managing a content-heavy site, or just keeping up with Google’s ever-changing rules, this edition highlights what actually matters. Google updates Google is refining its search results, phasing out certain structured data features, including FAQ snippets and COVID-19 updates. But that doesn’t mean you should strip structured data from your site. It still plays a role behind the scenes, especiall…

OpenAI is trying to reassure paying users after ChatGPT surfaced what looked like ads from brands like Target and Peloton – and said those prompts weren’t ads at all. What happened. Paying ChatGPT users shared screenshots of promotional-style prompts, including a message urging them to “Shop for home and groceries. Connect Target.” In response, OpenAI said those prompts were recommendations for apps built on the ChatGPT platform, with “no financial component.” Users saw a brand logo and a call to action – and drew the obvious conclusion: these were ads. Users were not pleased. One response: “Bruhhh… Don’t insult your paying users.” What OpenAI is sayi…

This season, Google Search and Shopping Ads are expected to surge past $70 billion in holiday spending. But there’s a hidden flaw in the auction system — one most advertisers don’t realize is costing them money even when competitors aren’t in the game. BrandPilot calls this the Uncontested Google Ads Problem, and it’s becoming one of the most overlooked sources of wasted ad spend in peak retail season. During SMX Next, John Beresford, Chief Revenue Officer at BrandPilot, unpacked how a little-known behavioral quirk in Google’s auction logic can cause advertisers to overspend on their own brand terms, their Shopping placements, and even their category keywords — si…

For the past decade, customer journey design has assumed one thing: the customer is human. A real person. Messy. Emotional. Overloaded. Someone who needs clarity, reassurance, and a sense of progress to keep moving forward. But in 2026, that assumption no longer holds. AI agents are starting to influence how people search, compare, choose, and buy. They filter results, generate shortlists, book services, and soon may even negotiate on our behalf. While much of AI usage is still task-based, it marks a critical shift. Once AI becomes part of how information is gathered, filtered, and prioritized, it begins to shape the decisions that follow. …

Google now adds Call Assets to Vehicle Ads so shoppers can call dealers right from the ad. Why we care. Vehicle Ads already attract high-intent buyers. Click-to-call removes friction at the exact moment they’re ready to speak with a dealer. The big picture. Automotive advertising is shifting toward immediacy. Buyers don’t want more forms. They want answers, availability, and a real person. Call-enabled Vehicle Ads shorten the path from search to conversation. Between the lines. Advertisers now carry more responsibility. When the ad becomes the point of conversion, call handling, staffing, and response quality directly shape performance. Dealers that treat …

Marketing mix modeling (MMM) has shifted from an enterprise luxury to an essential measurement tool. Tech giants like Google, Meta, and Uber have released powerful open-source MMM frameworks that anyone can use for free. The challenge is understanding which tool actually solves your problem and which require a PhD in statistics to implement. Open-source MMM tools are often grouped together but solve different problems The landscape can be confusing because these tools serve fundamentally different purposes despite being mentioned together. Google’s Meridian and Meta’s Robyn are complete, production-ready MMM frameworks that take your marketing data a…

News executives expect search referrals to drop by more than 40% over the next three years, as search engines continue evolving into AI-driven answer engines, according to a new Reuters Institute report. That shift is squeezing publisher traffic and accelerating a move away from classic SEO toward AEO and GEO. Why we care. Google’s AI Overviews and chatbot-style search are changing how people get information, often without clicking through. SEO visibility, attribution, and ROI models built on old playbooks are breaking fast. What’s happening. Publishers expect search traffic to nearly halve. Survey respondents forecast search engine traffic down 43% within three y…

If there’s one takeaway as we look toward SEO in 2026, it’s that visibility is no longer just about ranking pages, but about being understood by increasingly selective AI-driven systems. In 2025, SEO proved it was not disappearing, but evolving, as search engines leaned more heavily on structure, authority, and trust to interpret content beyond the click. In this article, we share SEO predictions for 2026 from Yoast SEO experts, Alex Moss and Carolyn Shelby, highlighting the shifts that will shape how brands earn visibility across search and AI-powered discovery experiences. Key takeaways In 2026, SEO focuses on visibility defined by clarity, authority, and trust rat…

As search marketers, we tend to focus on what we can control: keywords, links, Core Web Vitals, indexed pages. We have dashboards for our dashboards. But not everything that shapes search behavior lives inside GSC, GA4, or your favorite rank tracker. One of the most influential forces sits just outside traditional SEO reporting: the social media halo effect. When a Reel takes off or a LinkedIn post hits the right nerve, it doesn’t just earn likes and comments. It creates curiosity about the brand, the product, or the person behind the post. And that curiosity almost always shows up in the same place: the search bar. The problem is that most SEO teams …