SEO Tools and Resources

As AI chatbots become the go-to tools for travel planning, product recommendations, and more, marketers face a growing challenge: how do you make sure your brand appears in the answers? Semrush believes it has the answer – and it’s launching an award program to spotlight the brands leading the way. The newly announced AI Visibility Awards recognize the companies most often cited, recommended, and surfaced in AI-generated responses, using Semrush’s AI Visibility Index, a dataset built from more than 2,500 real prompts run through ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode. Andrew Warden, CMO at Semrush, said: “This year marks a turning point in how brands earn visibilit…

Google Ads is rolling out new location targeting options for Demand Gen campaigns, bringing them in line with controls already available in Search. What’s new. Advertisers can now explicitly choose between Presence or interest and Presence only when setting up Demand Gen campaigns. The option is available directly in the campaign interface, eliminating the need for manual exclusions. Why we care. Until now, advertisers running Demand Gen had limited precision over geo-targeting. By making “presence only” targeting native to the campaign setup, Google removes a common workaround and the risk of accidental geo-leakage. The result is cleaner traffic, more accurat…

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-…

Google made another change to the JavaScript SEO documentation help document to explain and clarify JavaScript execution on non-200 HTTP status codes. The change. Google wrote, “All pages with a 200 HTTP status code are sent to the rendering queue, no matter whether JavaScript is present on the page.” “If the HTTP status code is non-200 (for example, on error pages with 404 status code), rendering might be skipped,” Google added. Google also clarified that Googlebot queues all pages with a 200 HTTP status code for rendering. Here is the section that was updated: Google explained, “While pages with a 200 HTTP status code are sent to rendering, this mi…

Incrementality testing in Google Ads is suddenly within reach for far more advertisers than before. Google has lowered the barriers to running these tests, making lift measurement possible even without enterprise-level budgets, as recently reported in Search Engine Land. That shift naturally raises a question: How is Google able to measure incrementality with so much less data? For years, reliable lift measurement was assumed to require large budgets, long test windows, and a tolerance for inconclusive results. So when Google claims it can now deliver more accurate results with as little as $5,000 in media spend, it understandably sounds like marketing sp…

Apple plans to introduce additional ads within App Store search results starting in 2026, expanding its search ad inventory while keeping strict limits on how advertisers can influence placement. What’s changing. The new ads will appear inline within App Store search results, alongside organic listings. Existing ads at the top of search results will remain unchanged. Apple says advertisers don’t need to take any action to appear in the new placements — and, notably, they can’t. What Apple is saying. In guidance shared with Apple Insider, Apple emphasized that relevance is non-negotiable: “If your app isn’t relevant to what the user is searching for, it won’t …

Missed the final SEO Update by Yoast of 2025? Our in-house principal SEOs, Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, broke down December’s biggest search shifts, from Gemini’s integration to Google’s publisher deals, and answered your burning questions. Don’t forget to watch the replay and sign up for the next edition! Watch the full replay below (or read on for the highlights). 2025 in a nutshell: The three biggest SEO shifts 2025 was the year AI officially took over search. Here’s what mattered most: From rankings to retrieval: AI overviews and chat interfaces made being cited more important than ranking #1. EEAT became non-negotiable: Google (and users) demand…

If you’re leading marketing right now, you’re probably knee-deep in planning season, and feeling a tension I hear from CMOs and VPs every year: “We build a plan, but the execution never matches the intent.” Sound familiar? You aren’t alone. The disconnect isn’t because goals were wrong or strategies were flawed. It’s because most SEO plans aren’t built to survive operational constraints: Shifting priorities. Surprise product launches. Algorithm updates. The inevitable “can you just quickly…” requests that derail your roadmap by March. After helping many businesses build SEO strategies, I’ve learned this: the winners aren’t the ones w…

Pages on your website can be well written, well laid out, supported by backlinks, and even meet E-E-A-T expectations – yet still fail to rank. While there are many possible explanations, one common issue is a misalignment with search intent, and it’s often harder to spot than it sounds. When the focus is on content, optimization, and usability, intent can easily be missed or misjudged. This is where AI can become a useful review tool, helping guide things back in the right direction. Get back to basics Whether you’re starting work on a new page or updating something older, beginning with the basics of search intent can help set you up for success. …

Google Search Console appears to have fixed the month-long delay with the page indexing report just about an hour ago. The report is now showing data as early as a few days ago, which is the normal timeframe for when this report is updated. Plus, emails about indexing issues have started going out from Search Console to site owners again. Page indexing report. It shows which pages Google can find and index on your site, along with any problems. You can also submit fixes there and see whether Google confirms they worked. Site owners and SEOs were stuck, they were unable to verify their “fixes” and unable to see if new pages were being indexed and if old pages were…

Googlebot once again generated more traffic than any other crawler in 2025, according to a new Cloudflare report. It outpaced every search and AI bot as Google continued crawling the web for search indexing and AI training. By the numbers. Googlebot accounted for more than 25% of all Verified Bot traffic observed by Cloudflare. Googlebot alone generated 4.5% of all HTML request traffic – more than all other AI bots combined (4.2%). AI “user action” crawling surged more than 15x year over year, showing a sharp rise in bots that simulate human behavior. Googlebot’s crawl volume dwarfed every other AI crawler, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. AI craw…

In this new era of generative AI technology, searchers have begun to swap keywords with prompts. Shorter and long-tail queries are being replaced by more conversational prompts, which tend to be longer and more in-depth. These days, searchers are expecting more complete answers than a paginated list of results. Until we get an AI-specific equivalent of Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, we can’t really see for certain what or how our audience is behaving on AI search platforms as they look for our content, brands or products. However, we can still look for proxies to emulate how this journey works. Here are multiple ways to use other data points as pro…

LinkedIn is making Reserved Ads generally available to all managed accounts, giving marketers the ability to lock in the first ad slot in the feed for premium visibility. What’s new. Reserved Ads let advertisers secure top-of-feed placement at a fixed rate, providing predictable delivery, consistent reach, and greater share of voice. Early results show the format drives up to 75% higher dwell time, 88% higher view-through rates, and delivers 99% of forecasted impressions, according to LinkedIn. How it works. Reserved Ads appear in the most visible ad slot on LinkedIn’s feed and support most Sponsored Content formats, including Video, Single Image, Carousel, Do…

Google has removed its long-standing unified pricing rules in Google Ad Manager, once again allowing publishers to set different price floors for Google demand versus other programmatic buyers. What changed. Publishers can now set bidder-specific floor prices in Ad Manager. For example, one buyer can be required to bid at least $5 while others compete at a lower $2 floor. Google has also rebranded “unified pricing rules” as simply “pricing rules.” The backstory. Before 2019, publishers often set higher floors for Google to counterbalance its data advantage. That flexibility disappeared when Google mandated uniform pricing across exchanges — a move later scrutinize…

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…

Google has expanded Product Studio inside Merchant Center, rolling out three new creative features that go beyond its original image generation tool. What’s new. In addition to image generation, Product Studio now lets merchants animate static product images into short videos using suggested text prompts, a move aimed squarely at short-form ads and social-style creative. Google has also added one-click background removal to help isolate products and create cleaner, more consistent Shopping visuals. The third update increases image resolution, allowing advertisers to upscale older or lower-quality assets to meet modern visual standards. Why we care. P…

Google today began rolling out Gemini 3 Flash as the default model powering AI Mode in Search worldwide. The upgrade brings faster performance and stronger reasoning to AI-generated search responses, Google said. Why we care. With AI Mode, Google continues to transition toward an AI-first search approach. More queries could be answered directly in AI Mode, reducing reliance on traditional organic listings. Improved reasoning allows AI Mode to handle comparison and planning tasks, multi-intent searches, and research-style queries. What’s changing. Gemini 3 Flash now powers AI Mode in Search globally. It replaces earlier Flash-class models previously used in AI…

Google Search’s Danny Sullivan and John Mueller pushed back – yet again – on the idea that brands need a separate AI SEO strategy, during the latest Search Off the Record episode. Sullivan’s take is simple: the acronyms keep multiplying (GEO, AEO, etc.), but the advice stays unchanged: Write for humans, not for ranking systems, whether those systems are traditional search or LLM-powered experiences. Why we care. As AI search grows, a lot of publishers and SEOs are feeling pressured to try something new. Google’s take: chasing AI tricks can actually hurt and distract you from making content people actually like. Google says the north star hasn’t moved. Sullivan…

Google updated its JavaScript SEO best practices document, for the second time this week, this time to clarify canonicalization best practices for JavaScript. In short, Google said “setting the canonical URL to the same URL as in the original HTML or if that isn’t possible, to leave the canonical URL out of the original HTML.” What Google added. Google added a new section over here and it reads: “The rel=”canonical” link tag helps Google find the canonical version of a page. You can use JavaScript to set the canonical URL, but keep in mind that you shouldn’t use JavaScript to change the canonical URL to something else than the URL you specified as the canonical U…

For years, PPC advertisers have considered Performance Max (and Smart Shopping before it) to be a black box, even a black hole. While its powerful automation drives convincing results, the lack of transparency into channel performance has been a persistent frustration. Now, Google is beginning to provide some answers. The rollout of the new Channel Performance report marks a significant step toward the transparency advertisers have been demanding. This guide explains what the report is, highlights its strengths and weaknesses, and shows you how to use it. What is the Channel Performance report – and why is it a big deal? The Channel Performance r…

If you’re planning to build a website or publish a blog post, you’ve probably heard the word permalink pop up. But what is a permalink, really? In simple words, it’s the permanent link to a page on your website, like the official street address of your house. No matter how many times you update your content, this link remains the same and tells people (and Google) exactly where that page is located. In this blog, we’ll break down what a permalink is, why it matters, how to pick the right permalink structure, and how Yoast SEO helps you manage everything easily. Quick note: If your website is already established, changing existing permalinks can cause broken links and …

Microsoft Copilot is transforming search advertising by turning everyday conversations into intent-rich signals advertisers can act on. ROAS increases 13-fold when users engage with Copilot before performing a search, according to Microsoft. Drawing from billions of first-party audience insights across Microsoft’s consumer ecosystem – including Bing, Edge, Xbox, LinkedIn, and Activision – Copilot identifies high-value audiences using deterministic data built from search intent, web activity, and profile information. This allows advertisers to reduce wasted impressions and stretch budgets further. The mechanics of intent-rich search The core propositi…

Why this matters now Marketing budgets in 2025 have stayed the same, yet expectations keep rising. CMOs report budgets stuck at roughly 7.7% of company revenue, which means teams are expected to do more with the same dollars. In that context, the most practical use of AI is not a moonshot, but a set of clear fixes to everyday bottlenecks that slow teams down and drive costs up. This article breaks down four problems that marketers face right now and how AI is already solving them. The difference today is that Artlist AI, including image, video and voice generators, turns AI from a novelty into a reliable production system. When you use AI to streamline your workflo…

Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, is clarifying how keyword match types interact with AI Overviews (AIO) and AI Mode ad placements — addressing ongoing confusion among advertisers testing AI Max and mixed match-type setups. Why we care. As ads expand into AI-powered placements, advertisers need to understand which keywords are eligible to serve — and when — to avoid unintentionally blocking reach or misreading performance. Back in May. Responding to questions from Marketing Director Yoav Eitani, Marvin confirmed that an ad can serve either above or below an AI Overview or within the AI Overview — but not both in the same auction: “Your ad could trigger to s…

Google rapidly expanded AI Overviews in search during 2025, then pulled back as they moved into commercial and navigational queries. These findings are based on a new Semrush analysis of more than 10 million keywords from January to November. AI Overviews surged, then retreated. Google didn’t roll out AI Overviews in a straight line in 2025. A mid-year spike gave way to a pullback, suggesting Google moved fast to test the feature, then eased off based on user data: January: 6.5% of queries triggered an AI Overview July: AI Overview visibility peaked, appearing in just under 25% of queries. November: Coverage fell back to less than 16% of queries. Zero-c…