SEO Tools and Resources

Digital PR is about to matter more than ever. Not because it’s fashionable, or because agencies have rebranded link building with a shinier label, but because the mechanics of search and discovery are changing. Brand mentions, earned media, and the wider PR ecosystem are now shaping how both search engines and large language models understand brands. That shift has serious implications for how SEO professionals should think about visibility, authority, and revenue. At the same time, informational search traffic is shrinking. Fewer people are clicking through long blog posts written to target top-of-funnel keywords. The commercial value in search is consolida…

AI-powered search gutted LinkedIn’s B2B awareness traffic. Across a subset of topics, non-brand organic visits fell by as much as 60% even while rankings stayed stable, the company said. LinkedIn is moving past the old “search, click, website” model and adopting a new framework: “Be seen, be mentioned, be considered, be chosen.” By the numbers. In a new article, LinkedIn said its B2B organic growth team started researching Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) in early 2024. By early 2025, when SGE evolved into AI Overviews, the impact became significant. Non-brand, awareness-driven traffic declined by up to 60% across a subset of B2B topics. Ranki…

Google may finally be starting to address a popular SEO and AI visibility “tactic”: self-promotional “best of” listicles. That’s according to new research by Lily Ray, vice president, SEO strategy and research at Amsive. Across several SaaS brands hit hard in January, a pattern emerged. Many relied heavily on review-style content that ranked their own product as the No. 1 “best” in its category, often updated with the current year to trigger recency signals. What’s happening. After the December 2025 core update, Google search results showed increased volatility throughout January, according to Barry Schwartz. Google hasn’t announced or confirmed any updates this y…

There’s a dangerous misconception in B2B marketing that video is just a “brand awareness” play. We tend to bucket video into two extremes: The “viral” top-of-funnel asset that gets views but no leads. The dry bottom-of-funnel product demo that gets leads but no views. This binary thinking is breaking your pipeline. In my role at LinkedIn, I have access to a unique view of the B2B buying ecosystem. What the data shows is that the most successful companies don’t treat video as a tactic for one stage of the funnel. They treat it as a multiplier. When you integrate video strategy across the entire buying journey – connecting brand to demand – effectivene…

Google Ads rolled out a data source diagnostics feature inside Data Manager that helps advertisers monitor the health of their data connections. The tool flags issues tied to offline conversions, CRM imports, and tagging mismatches. How it works. A centralized dashboard assigns clear connection status labels — Excellent, Good, Needs attention, or Urgent — and surfaces actionable alerts. Advertisers can see problems like refused credentials, formatting errors, and failed imports alongside a run history showing recent sync attempts and error counts. Why we care. When conversion data breaks, campaign optimization breaks with it. Even small data connection failure…

Google Search Advocate John Mueller responded to a Reddit user who asked whether SEO is still “enough,” or if marketers now need to think about generative engine optimization (GEO). Mueller’s answer was simple: labels matter less than reality. “If you have an online business that makes money from referred traffic, it’s definitely a good idea to consider the full picture, and prioritize accordingly.” AI isn’t going away. Mueller didn’t get into the name debate or confirm GEO as a new discipline, but he made it clear AI is here to stay: “What you call it doesn’t matter, but ‘AI’ is not going away.” So far, Google, has pushed back on the idea that AI op…

Google Ads is constantly changing and evolving. With these changes come fresh mistakes PPC advertisers make in optimizing and managing their campaigns. This article breaks down the most common mistakes of 2026 so you can avoid repeating them this year. Mistake 1: Inconsistent conversion tracking setup Optimization decisions rely on conversion data. If your tracking is inconsistent, your entire account data becomes skewed. When conversions use different attribution methods, count types, and conversion windows, the data applies unevenly across your account, making it hard to judge the value of any click. In rare cases, you may override conversion trac…

Advertisers are spotting signs that Google is increasing the number of video assets allowed per Asset Group in Performance Max campaigns — from 5 videos to as many as 15. Why we care. Video is increasingly central to Performance Max performance, but the current five-video cap forces trade-offs. Advertisers often have to choose between formats or ratios, limiting coverage across YouTube, Discover and other placements. What’s changing. With up to 15 videos per Asset Group, advertisers would be able to include multiple creatives while still covering all three major video ratios. That means less need to fragment campaigns or duplicate Asset Groups just to accommodate …

Yoast AI Brand Insights now lets you track how your brand appears in Google’s Gemini. You can see your Gemini data alongside ChatGPT and Perplexity, all in one dashboard. With a single analysis, you can see how different AI platforms describe your brand with the Yoast SEO AI+ plan. You’ll see which sources they use and how sentiment compares across the tools your customers use most. Why this matters AI platforms use different methods to answer questions about your brand, often leading to different results. Seeing these results side-by-side helps you spot gaps or missed opportunities in your brand’s AI presence. ChatGPT is designed as a conversational a…

Search visibility isn’t what it used to be. Rankings still matter, but they’re no longer the whole story. Today, discovery happens across traditional search results, local listings, brand knowledge panels, and increasingly, AI-driven experiences that surface answers without a click. For marketers, that makes visibility harder to measure — and easier to lose. SEO teams now operate in a landscape where accuracy, consistency, and trust signals matter as much as keywords. Business information, reviews, and brand authority determine whether a brand shows up at all, especially as AI-powered search reshapes how results are generated and displayed. As a result, many bran…

AI has quickly risen to the top of the corporate agenda. Despite this, 95% of businesses struggle with adoption, MIT research found. Those failures are no longer hypothetical. They are already playing out in real time, across industries, and often in public. For companies exploring AI adoption, these examples highlight what not to do and why AI initiatives fail when systems are deployed without sufficient oversight. 1. Chatbot participates in insider trading, then lies about it In an experiment driven by the UK government’s Frontier AI Taskforce, ChatGPT placed illegal trades and then lied about it. Researchers prompted the AI bot to act as a trader f…

Microsoft has been promising to give data on the performance of websites mentioned in AI results within Bing and Copilot since February 2023 and then again in April 2023. But then decided to let us down and only lump the data together with web queries, not giving us a clear view of how our sites perform within Bing’s AI experiences. Now Bing is reportedly testing showing a new report within Bing Webmaster Tools named AI Performance report. AI Performance report. This report is currently in a super limited beta – Microsoft has not announced anything about this publicly. But a source told us this report shows citation data from both Microsoft Copilot and partners. …

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…

Competitive research is a gold mine of insights in the world of organic discovery. Clients always love seeing insights about how they stack up against their rivals, and the insights are very easily translated into a multi-dimensional roadmap for getting traction on essential topics. If you haven’t already done this, 2026 needs to be the year when you add competitive research from answer engine optimization (AEO) (I’ll use this acronym interchangeably with AI search) into your organic strategy – and not just because your executives or clients are clamoring for it (although I’m guessing they are). This article breaks down the distinct roles of SEO and AEO competitiv…

Natural language is quickly becoming the default way people interact with online tools. Instead of typing a few keywords, users now ask full questions, give detailed instructions, and are starting to expect clear, conversational answers. So, how can you make sure your content provides the answer to their question? Or better yet, how can you make it possible for them to interact with your website in a similar way? That’s where Microsoft’s NLWeb comes in. Meet NLWeb, Microsoft’s new open project NLWeb, short for Natural Language Web, is an open project recently launched by Microsoft. The aim of this project is to bring conversational interfaces directly to websites,…

Search marketing is still as powerful as ever. Google recently surpassed $100 billion in ad revenue in a single quarter, with more than half coming from search. But search alone can no longer deliver the same results most businesses expect. As Google Ads Coach Jyll Saskin Gales showed at SMX Next, real performance now comes from going beyond traditional search and using it to strengthen a broader PPC strategy. The challenge with traditional Search Marketing As search marketers, we’re great at reaching people who are actively searching for what we sell. But we often miss people who fit our ideal audience and aren’t searching yet. The real opportunity sits at…

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…

AI is no longer an experimental layer in search. It’s actively mediating how customers discover, evaluate, and choose local businesses, increasingly without a traditional search interaction. The real risk is data stagnation. As AI systems act on local data for users, brands that fail to adapt risk declining visibility, data inconsistencies, and loss of control over how locations are represented across AI surfaces. Learn how AI is changing local search and what you can do to stay visible in this new landscape. How AI search is different from traditional search We are experiencing a platform shift where machine inference, not database retrieval, drives d…

Google Search is entering an “expansionary moment” driven by longer queries, more follow-up questions, and growing use of voice and images. That’s according to Alphabet’s executives who spoke on last night’s Q4 earnings call. In other words: Google Search is evolving into AI-driven experiences where conversations increasingly happen inside Google’s own interfaces. Why we care. AI in Google Search is no longer an experiment. It is a structural change that is altering user behavior and is reshaping discovery, visibility, and traffic across the web. By the numbers. Alphabet’s Q4 advertising revenue totaled $82.284 billion, up 13.5% from $72.461 billion 2024: …

Representatives from both the Google Search and Bing Search teams are recommending against creating separate markdown (.md) pages for LLM purposes. The purpose is to serve one piece of content to the LLM and another piece of content to your users, which technically may be considered a form of cloaking and against Google’s policies. The question. Lily Ray asked on Bluesky: “Not sure if you can answer, but starting to hear a lot about creating separate markdown / JSON pages for LLMs and serving those URLs to bots.” Google’s response. John Mueller from Google responded saying: “I’m not aware of anything in that regard. In my POV, LLMs have trained on – rea…

On episode 340 of PPC Live The Podcast, I speak to Amanda Farley, CMO of Aimclear and a multi-award-winning marketing leader, brings a mix of honesty and expertise to the PPC Live conversation. A self-described T-shaped marketer, she combines deep PPC knowledge with broad experience across social, programmatic, PR, and integrated strategy. Her journey — from owning an gallery and tattoo studio to leading award-winning global campaigns — reflects a career built on curiosity, resilience, and continuous learning. Overcoming limiting beliefs and embracing creativity Amanda once ran an gallery and tattoo parlor while believing she wasn’t an artist herself. Surrounded b…

Let me guess: you just spent three months building a perfectly optimized product taxonomy, complete with schema markup, internal linking, and killer metadata. Then, the product team decided to launch a site redesign without telling you. Now half your URLs are broken, the new templates strip out your structured data, and your boss is asking why organic traffic dropped 40%. Sound familiar? Here’s the thing: this isn’t an SEO failure, but a governance failure. It’s costing you nights and weekends trying to fix problems that should never have happened in the first place. This article covers why weak governance keeps breaking SEO, how AI has raised the stakes…

Google Ads is rolling out recommended experiments on the Experiments page, surfacing test ideas based on an account’s setup and performance data. How it works: The platform suggests experiment opportunities — such as testing bidding strategies, creative variations, or new campaign features — and presents them directly inside the Experiments dashboard. Each recommendation includes a preconfigured experiment setup Advertisers can launch immediately or customize settings Suggestions appear alongside the standard Create Experiment workflow Why we care. By removing the need to build tests from scratch, Google is lowering the barrier to experimentation. A…

Remember when a handful of links from sites in your niche could drive steady organic traffic? That era is over. Today, Google’s AI Overviews and the rise of answer engines like ChatGPT raise the bar. You have to do more to stay visible. Hiring an experienced link building agency is one efficient way to meet that challenge. It’s also one of the most important investments you’ll make. The right partner doesn’t just build links. They position your brand as a trusted, cited source in the AI era. So how do you choose the right agency for your company? While the interface has changed, the core ranking signals remain largely the same. What’s changed is their prio…

The debate around llms.txt has become one of the most polarized topics in web optimization. Some treat llms.txt as foundational infrastructure, while many SEO veterans dismiss it as speculative theater. Platform tools flag missing llms.txt files as site issues, yet server logs show that AI crawlers rarely request them. Google even adopted it. Sort of. In December, the company added llms.txt files across many developer and documentation sites. The signal seemed clear: if the company behind the sitemap standard is implementing llms.txt, it likely matters. Except Google pulled it from its Search developer docs within 24 hours. Google’s John Mueller sai…