SEO Tools and Resources

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…

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…

For many local businesses, performance looks healthier than it is. Rank trackers still show top-three positions. Visibility reports appear steady. Yet calls and website visits from Google Business Profiles are falling — sometimes fast. This gap is becoming a defining feature of local search today. Rankings are holding. Visibility and performance aren’t. The alligator has arrived in local SEO. The visibility crisis behind stable rankings Across multiple U.S. industries, traditional local 3-packs are being replaced — or at least supplemented — by AI-powered local packs. These layouts behave differently from the map results we’ve optimized in the past.…

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…

Most PPC teams still build campaigns the same way: pull a keyword list, set match types, and organize ad groups around search terms. It’s muscle memory. But Google’s auction no longer works that way. Search now behaves more like a conversation than a lookup. In AI Mode, users ask follow-up questions and refine what they’re trying to solve. AI Overviews reason through an answer first, then determine which ads support that answer. In Google Ads, the auction isn’t triggered by a keyword anymore – it’s triggered by inferred intent. If you’re still structuring campaigns around exact and phrase match, you’re planning for a system that no longer exists. The new f…

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: …

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…

Right now, it’s hard to find a marketing conversation that doesn’t include two letters: AI. SEOs, strategists, and marketing leaders everywhere are asking the same question in different ways: How do we use AI to cut manpower, streamline work, move faster, and boost efficiency? Much of that thinking makes sense. If you run a business, you can’t ignore a tool that turns hours of grunt work into minutes. You’d be foolish to try. But we’re spending too much time asking, “Can AI do this?” and not enough time asking, “Should AI do this?” Once the initial excitement fades, some uncomfortable questions show up. If every title tag, meta description, land…

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’…

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…

In 2015, PPC was a game of direct control. You told Google exactly which keywords to target, set manual bids at the keyword level, and capped spend with a daily budget. If you were good with spreadsheets and understood match types, you could build and manage 30,000-keyword accounts all day long. Those days are gone. In 2026, platform automation is no longer a helpful assistant. It’s the primary driver of performance. Fighting that reality is a losing battle. Automation has leveled the playing field and, in many cases, given PPC marketers back their time. But staying effective now requires a different skill set: understanding how automated systems learn and h…

Anthropic is drawing the line against advertising in AI chatbots. Claude will remain ad-free, the company said, even as rival AI platforms experiment with sponsored messages and branded placements inside conversations. Ads inside AI chats would erode trust, warp incentives, and clash with how people actually use assistants like Claude (for work, problem-solving, and sensitive topics), Anthropic said in a new blog post. Why we care. Anthropic’s position removes Claude, and its user base of 30 million, from the AI advertising equation. Brands shouldn’t expect sponsored links, conversations, or responses inside Claude. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is about to give brands the …

The U.S. Justice Department and a coalition of states plan to appeal a federal judge’s remedies ruling in the Google search antitrust case. The appeal challenges a decision that found Google illegally monopolized search but stopped short of imposing major structural changes, such as forcing a divestiture of Chrome or banning default search deals outright. What’s happening. The DOJ and state attorneys general filed notices of appeal yesterday, challenging U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta’s September remedies ruling, Bloomberg and Reuters reported. Mehta ruled in August 2024 that Google unlawfully maintained its search monopoly through default search agreements w…

If your CPCs keep climbing, the cause may not be your bid strategy, your budget, or even your competitors. You might be suffering from low ad quality. Let’s break down the most foundational — and most misunderstood — metric in your Google Ads account. If you want to stop overpaying Google and start winning auctions on merit, you need to understand how the 1-to-10 Quality Score actually works. The difference between Quality Score, Ad Strength, and Optimization Score Before we dive in, let’s clear up the confusion. Google shows a lot of “scores” and “diagnostics,” and you can safely ignore most of them. Quality Score is the exception. Ad strength is an …

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…

AI search hasn’t killed SEO. Now you have to win twice: the ranking and the citation. Google searches for almost anything today, and there’s a good chance you’ll see an AI Overview before the organic results, sometimes even before the ads. That summary frames the query, shortlists sources, and shapes which brands get considered. AI Overviews now appear for about 21% of all keywords, according to Ahrefs. And 99.9% are triggered by informational intent. Search rankings still matter. But AI summaries increasingly determine who wins early consideration. Here’s what we’re seeing: brands aren’t losing visibility because they dropped from position thr…

Google has updated two of its help documents to explain the limits of Googlebot when it crawls. Specifically, how much Googlebot can consume by filetype and format. The limits. The limits, some of which were documented already and are not new, include: 15MB for web pages: Google wrote, “By default, Google’s crawlers and fetchers only crawl the first 15MB of a file.” 64MB for PDF files: Google wrote, “When crawling for Google Search, Googlebot crawls the first 2MB of a supported file type, and the first 64MB of a PDF file.” 2MB for supported files types: Google wrote, “When crawling for Google Search, Googlebot crawls the first 2MB of a supported file type,…

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…

Microsoft Advertising today launched the Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), a system that lets publishers license premium content to AI products and get paid based on how that content is used. How it works. PCM creates a direct value exchange. Publishers set licensing and usage terms, while AI builders discover and license content for specific grounding scenarios. The marketplace also includes usage-based reporting, giving publishers visibility into how their content performs and where it creates the most value. Designed to scale. PCM is designed to avoid one-off licensing deals between individual publishers and AI providers. Participation is voluntary, ownershi…

Vibe coding is a new way to create software using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Cursor, Replit, and Gemini. It works by describing to the tool what you want in plain language and receiving written code in return. You can then simply paste the code into an environment (such as Google Colab), run it, and test the results, all without ever actually programming a single line of code. Collins Dictionary named “vibe coding” word of the year in 2025, defining it as “the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to write computer code.” In this guide, you’ll understand how to start vibe coding, learn its limitations and risks, and see examples of great tools…

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…

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…

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…

Google spoke about its year-end report on the crawling challenges Google faced in 2025 when crawling and indexing the web for Google Search. The biggest challenges include faceted navigation and action parameters, which make up about 75% of those challenges, Gary Illyes from Google said. This was on its latest Search Off the Record podcast, published this morning. What is the issue. Crawling issues can cause your site to lag and slow, it can overload your server, and make your website unusable and inaccessible. If a robot goes off on your site and gets into some infinite loop of crawling, it can take some time for the site to recover. “Once it discovers a set of …

Microsoft has rolled out multi-turn search globally within Bing search results. Microsoft will add a Copilot search box to the bottom of the Bing search results, as you scroll down the search results page, this feature will dynamically appear. What is multi-turn search. This is when a searcher goes from the Bing search results, types in a follow up query into the Copilot search box at the bottom of the search results. Here is a screenshot of this feature: Here is a video of it in action: What Microsoft said. Jordi Ribas, CVP, Head of Search at Microsoft, posted this news on X – he said, “After shipping in the US last year, multi-turn search in Bing i…