SEO Tools and Resources

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…

The local SEO community remains locked in a permanent debate over the “hide address” toggle for service area businesses (SABs). Most owners view this switch as a simple privacy setting. In reality, it’s a high-stakes decision that dictates how Google’s algorithm interprets your physical relevance. Does your defined service area influence where you rank? Does hiding your street address suppress your visibility in the local pack? Most importantly, does Google purge that data from its system, or does your map pin simply become an invisible anchor? These are fundamental and relevant questions of how proximity functions when you choose to go off the grid. …

Google released the March 2026 core update today, the company announced. This is the first core update from Google in 2026, and follows the quick March 2026 spam update from a couple of days ago. It also follows the February 2026 Discover update. What Google is saying. Google updated its Search Status Dashboard to state: “Released the March 2026 core update. The rollout may take up to 2 weeks to complete..” Google added on LinkedIn: “This is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites. The rollout may take up to 2 weeks to complete..” About core updates. Core updates roll out sev…

The March 2026 SEO Update by Yoast is part of our monthly webinar series covering the latest developments in search and AI. Hosted by Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, this month’s session explored how AI is reshaping search, Google’s latest moves, and what brands should prioritize now. Watch the full recap on YouTube to dive deeper into these topics, hear audience questions, and see real-world examples. SEO and AI news from March 2026 AI tools become more personal and mobile AI is moving beyond standalone apps, integrating into messaging platforms (like Claude’s Telegram/Discord support) and desktop environments (e.g., Meta’s My Computer). This shift makes AI…

Today, Google released Google Search Live globally where AI Mode is available, for these languages and regions. This brings Search Live to more than 200 countries and territories. Google credits its new audio and voice model, Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, which it says “delivers even more natural and intuitive conversations.” The “new model is also inherently multilingual, which means that people around the world can now speak with Search in their preferred language,” Google added. How it works. To use Search Live, open the Google app on Android or iOS and tap the Live icon under the Search bar. From there, you can ask your question out loud to get a helpful audio respon…

Google is launching new Performance Max controls and reporting: audience exclusions, expanded reporting, and budget forecasting tools. What’s new. Google announced a mix of “steering updates” and “actionable insights” for PMax: First-party audience exclusions: You can exclude customer lists to shift spend toward net-new customer acquisition instead of repeat conversions. Budget reporting: A new in-platform report projects end-of-month spend and shows how daily budget changes impact performance. Full audience reporting: You get detailed breakdowns by demographics, including age and gender. Network segmentation: You can segment placement reports by network…

Automated traffic grew 23.5% year over year in 2025 — about eight times faster than human traffic, which rose 3.1%, according to HUMAN Security’s State of AI Traffic report. AI-driven traffic appears to be a major contributor to that growth, with average monthly volume increasing 187% year over year, while traffic from AI agents and agentic browsers (e.g., OpenAI’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet) grew nearly 8,000% year over year. Automated traffic is defined in the report as: “All internet traffic generated by software systems rather than human users, including traditional automation such as search engine crawlers, monitoring bots, and conventional scraping tools, as …

Google introduced a new user agent, called Google-Agent, that signals when AI agents act on users’ behalf, marking an early shift toward agent-driven web interactions. What happened. Google added Google-Agent to its list of user-triggered fetchers on March 20 and has begun a gradual rollout. The Google-Agent user agent identifies requests made by AI agents running on Google infrastructure, including experimental tools like Project Mariner. How it works. Google-Agent appears in HTTP requests when an AI agent visits a site to complete a user-initiated task. Example use cases include browsing pages, evaluating content, or taking actions such as submitting f…

While initially criticized as a black box, Performance Max has evolved into a fairly critical campaign type. With each passing quarter, Google has introduced more functionality and visibility. Additional reporting is helpful, but what matters is what you can actually act on. While you can’t control everything in Performance Max, there are specific levers that can have a meaningful impact on performance. Here are the parts of PMax you can control and how to use them effectively. Control what you can: Search terms and placements One of the most exciting updates in the last year to Performance Max has been the ability to add these campaign-level negative keywords.…

A company called Clickout Media is being called out for buying trusted news and niche sites, replacing them with AI-generated gambling content, and abandoning them after Google penalties. Some call this “parasite SEO,” but to me it sounds more like large-scale search spam. What’s happening. The company acquired sports, gaming, and tech sites, then rapidly shifted them from editorial coverage to casino and crypto content, PressGazette reported. Sites were stripped of original reporting, filled with AI-written articles, and used to push offshore gambling links, according to former employees. How it works. The strategy relies on buying domains with existing aut…

Like it or not, everyone is fishing in the same pond. As content marketers and SEO practitioners, we all have the same subscriptions to Semrush and other SEO tools, giving us access to the same data as our competitors. If we all have the same tools, aren’t we just writing the same content? There’s a better way. You may be sitting on a wealth of data about your target audience and your existing customers, and you don’t even know it. These insights are invisible to your competitors, yet they’re unread, unanalyzed, and underutilized by the marketing team. The problem: Third-party tools can create an over-commoditized content echo chamber While SEO toolse…

Google expanded its structured data support for forum and Q&A pages, adding properties that help you signal reply threads, quoted content, and whether content is human- or machine-generated. The update aims to reduce how Google misreads discussion and Q&A content. What changed. Google’s QAPage docs now support commentCount and digitalSourceType. DiscussionForumPosting docs now support sharedContent plus the same commentCount and digitalSourceType. The details. In Q&A markup, you can use commentCount on questions, answers, and comments to show total comments even if not fully marked up. answerCount + commentCount should equal total replies of any type.…

In November 2025, Google solved a persistent SEO reporting challenge: separating branded from non-branded search performance directly in Google Search Console (GSC). The feature is now fully rolled out to eligible properties. For years, we’ve relied on regular expression (regex) filters, custom dashboards like Looker Studio, or third-party tools — approaches that were often inconsistent and difficult to maintain. Now, GSC’s branded query filter brings that capability natively into one of the most widely used organic reporting platforms. With this shift, a key gap in SEO reporting becomes easier to address — along with some of the assumptions behind it. Brand deman…

LinkedIn Ads consistently delivers some of the highest-quality B2B leads in paid media. But it also has a reputation for being very expensive — for both cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-lead (CPL) metrics. Because of that reputation, I wanted to test a theory: that I could get low CPCs and low-cost qualified leads from LinkedIn Ads by creating a highly valuable, audience-specific piece of content. As an agency, we usually run LinkedIn Ads campaigns for our clients. We don’t really run many paid ads for ourselves. However, to have the most control over this test, I decided that Saltbox Solutions would be the guinea pig. (Disclosure: I’m the director of strategy at…

WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2025 benchmarks show nearly 87% of industries saw year-over-year CPC increases. The cross-industry Google Ads average reached $5.26 per click. High-intent verticals are higher: legal services average $8.58, and the most competitive B2B categories approach or exceed $8 to $9 per click. These increases reflect structural shifts in how search results pages are designed, how auctions are optimized, and how inefficiencies compound across paid search accounts. Many remain invisible until a structured PPC audit uncovers them. Protecting the budget you already have — starting with your branded terms — is where recovery begins. Here are the five tre…

Once upon a time, in the delightfully chaotic 1990s, web copywriting was all about exact-match keywords and relentless meta tag stuffing. As algorithms matured, so did SEO copywriting. Now, with proposition-based retrieval systems, writing like you’re in the business of tricking a crawler into seeing relevance through keyword repetition is no longer a viable strategy. Below is a playbook for generative AI-friendly copywriting, broken down into self-contained, high-density concepts. The ‘grounding budget’: Quality over quantity Large language models (LLMs) don’t seek less information. They seek higher information density. Google’s Gemini operates on a limi…

Google released the March 2026 spam update less than 24 hours ago and it is already done rolling out. The update finished today, March 25, 2026 at 10:40am ET. This update was released yesterday, March 24, 2026 at 3:20 p.m. It took 19 hours and 30 minutes to fully rollout, which is super fast. Why we care. This is the second announced Google algorithm update of 2026. It’s unclear what spam this update targets, but if you see ranking or traffic changes in the next few days, it could be due to it. More on spam update. Google’s documentation says: “While Google’s automated systems to detect search spam are constantly operating, we occasionally make notable im…

Influencer content isn’t just a brand awareness play. It’s showing up in Google SERPs, Google AI Overviews, and AI answers, making keyword strategy an essential part of every influencer brief. When we brief an influencer, we assign them a keyword. Not as a nice-to-have, but as a required part of the strategy, usually woven into the script, the caption, the on-screen text, and the hashtags. That might sound like an SEO team overreaching into an influencer team’s lane. But in 2026, the lane lines don’t exist. Social content is search inventory. If your influencer marketing program isn’t built around that reality, you’re leaving a significant and measurable shar…

Does schema markup really benefit AI search optimization? Some suggest it can 3x your citations or dramatically boost AI visibility. But when you dig into the evidence, the picture is far more nuanced. Let’s separate what’s known from what’s assumed, and look at how schema actually fits into an AI search strategy. How schema fits into AI search now Search is shifting from surfacing a SERP with blue links to AI Overviews, generative answers, and chat‑style summaries that collate content in addition to links. To get your content to appear in this model, your site has to be understood as entities — singular, unique things or concepts, such as a person, place,…

You know the feeling. You launch a new TikTok ad. Early metrics look great — low CPCs, high engagement, and a ROAS that makes you look like a pro. Then, a few days later, performance slips. Ad frequency creeps up, the hook rate drops, and you’re suddenly back at the drawing board. Some call it creative fatigue. On TikTok, it’s closer to creative exhaustion. A TikTok ad’s “half-life” is shorter than any other platform. If you’re still treating it like a Meta ad campaign, you’ll lose. To win, treat creative like a supply chain, not a campaign asset. Why TikTok creative decays so quickly On intent-based platforms like Google, Amazon, or Pinterest…

For the past several years, marketing strategy has reorganized itself around a simple premise. Third-party data is fading. Privacy expectations are rising. The solution, we are told, is first-party data. Collect more of it. Centralize it. Build the customer view around it. In many ways, the shift was necessary. Direct relationships with customers are more durable than rented audiences. Consent and transparency matter. Organizations that invested early in their own data ecosystems are better positioned today than those that relied entirely on external signals. But the industry’s confidence in first-party data has grown so strong that it now obscures a more comp…

Google released its March 2026 spam update today at 3:20 p.m. It’s the second announced Google algorithm update of 2026, following the February 2026 Discover core update. This is the first spam update of 2026. Google’s most recent spam update was in August 2025. Timing. This update may only “take a few days to complete,” Google said. On LinkedIn, Google added: “This is a normal spam update, and it will roll out for all languages and locations. The rollout may take a few days to complete.” Why we care. This is the second announced Google algorithm update of 2026. It’s unclear what spam this update targets, but if you see ranking or traffic changes in…

Reddit is doubling down on commerce, rolling out a suite of new shopping features designed to help retailers capitalise on the platform’s growing role in the purchase journey. Why now. Reddit’s shopping momentum is hard to ignore — the platform has seen a 40% year-over-year increase in shopping conversations, and, according to Reddit, 84% of shoppers say they feel more confident in purchases after researching products on Reddit. Despite this, Fospha’s State of Retail Commerce 2026 study identifies Reddit as the most undervalued channel in the media mix. What’s new. Collection Ads — a new Dynamic Product Ad format that pairs a lifestyle hero image with shoppab…

AI search citations favor a small set of formats. Listicles, articles, and product pages drive over half of all mentions across major LLMs, according to new Wix Studio AI Search Lab research analyzing 75,000 AI answers and more than 1 million citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. The findings. Listicles led at 21.9% of citations, followed by articles (16.7%) and product pages (13.7%). Together, these three formats made up 52% of all AI citations. Articles dominated informational queries, cited 2.7x more than other formats. Listicles captured 40% of commercial-intent citations, nearly double any other type. Why intent wins. Query intent…