SEO Tools and Resources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8AfAJUDFWY Search marketers are starting to build, not just optimize. Across SEO and PPC teams, vibe coding and AI-powered development tools are shrinking the gap between idea and execution – from weeks of developer queues to hours of hands-on experimentation. These tools don’t replace developers, but they do let search teams create and test interactive content on their own timelines. That matters because Google’s AI Overviews are pulling more answers directly into the SERP, leaving fewer clicks for brand websites. In a zero-click environment, the ability to build unique, useful, conversion-focused tools is becoming o…

Brand-agency partnerships look very different today than they did even a few years ago, and by 2026 that gap will only widen. Internal marketing teams are more sophisticated, digital channels are more specialized, and the role agencies play is no longer one-size-fits-all. As a result, the companies that get the most value from agency relationships aren’t always the biggest spenders. They’re the ones that are clear about what they need and what they don’t. That clarity starts with understanding the true role an agency should play inside your organization. Too many partnerships struggle because expectations and responsibilities were never properly al…

Generative AI is everywhere right now. It dominates conference agendas, fills LinkedIn feeds, and is reshaping how many businesses think about organic search. Brands are racing to optimize for AI Overviews, build vector embeddings, map semantic clusters, and rework content models around LLMs. What gets far less attention is a basic reality: for most websites, AI platforms still drive a small share of overall traffic. AI search is growing, no question. But in most cases, total referral sessions from all LLM platforms combined amount to only about 2% to 3% of the organic traffic Google alone delivers. Despite that gap, many teams are spending more …

Google appears to be rolling out the Performance Max Channel Performance report at the MCC level, giving agencies and large advertisers a long-awaited view of channel-level performance across multiple accounts. What’s new: The Channel Performance report, previously limited to individual accounts, is now surfacing in some manager (MCC) accounts. Google had previously confirmed the feature was coming, but this marks one of the first confirmed sightings in live environments. Why we care. MCC-level visibility allows agencies to analyze how Performance Max allocates spend and drives results across channels—Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Shopping—wit…

In 2025, Google is removing reviews at unprecedented rates – and it is not accidental. Our industry analysis of 60,000 Google Business Profiles shows that deletions are being driven by a mix of: Automated moderation. Industry-wide risk factors. Increased enforcement against incentivized reviews. Local regulatory pressure. Together, these forces have significant implications for businesses and local search visibility. Review deletions are on the up globally Data collected from tens of thousands of Google Business Profile listings across multiple countries by GMBapi.com show a sharp increase in deleted reviews between January and July 2025. …

For the past decade, image SEO was largely a matter of technical hygiene: Compressing JPEGs to appease impatient visitors. Writing alt text for accessibility. Implementing lazy loading to keep LCP scores in the green. While these practices remain foundational to a healthy site, the rise of large, multimodal models such as ChatGPT and Gemini has introduced new possibilities and challenges. Multimodal search embeds content types into a shared vector space. We are now optimizing for the “machine gaze.” Generative search makes most content machine-readable by segmenting media into chunks and extracting text from visuals through optical character …

Discovery now happens before search demand is visible in Google. In 2026, interest forms across social feeds, communities, and AI-generated answers – long before it shows up as keyword search volume. By the time demand appears in SEO tools, the opportunity to shape how a concept is understood has already passed. This creates a problem for how search marketing research is typically done. Keyword tools, search volume, and Google Trends are lagging indicators. They reveal what people cared about yesterday, not what they are starting to explore now. In a landscape shaped by AI Overviews, social SERPs, and shrinking organic real estate, arriving lat…

Microsoft Advertising rolled out asset-level editorial review, giving advertisers visibility into policy approvals for individual ad components — not just entire ads — and reducing delays caused by single non-compliant elements. What’s new. First announced in June, advertisers can now see headlines, descriptions, and images reviewed separately inside the Microsoft Advertising interface. If one asset violates policy, only that component is blocked, while compliant assets continue to serve. Why we care. This shift minimizes campaign disruption and speeds up approvals. Instead of rebuilding or resubmitting whole ads, advertisers can quickly identify and fix the e…

Google will update its Pharmaceutical policy for AdMob Authorized Buyers in January 2026, allowing prescription drug and prescription drug service ads in select markets — without requiring Google certification — while tightening clarity around what remains strictly off-limits. What’s changing. The policy will be renamed “Pharmaceutical products and services” and updated to allow Authorized Buyers to promote prescription drugs and prescription drug services in certain countries where permitted by local law, without requiring Google certification as is typically mandated in Google Ads. While access is expanding, the underlying rules are not becoming more permissive…

Google said today that it is suing SerpApi, accusing the company of bypassing security protections to scrape, harvest, and resell copyrighted content from Google Search results. The allegations: Google said SerpApi: Circumvented Google’s security measures and industry-standard crawling controls. Ignored website directives that specify whether content can be accessed. Used cloaking, rotating bot identities, and large bot networks to scrape content at scale. Took licensed content from Search features, including images and real-time data, and resold it for profit. What Google is saying. “Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override [crawling] directives and …

Did you know that duplicate content can hurt your visibility within AI Search? Fabrice Canel and Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft explained that with AI Search, having duplicate content makes it harder for the systems to understand signals which reduces “the likelihood that the correct version will be selected or summarized.” This is not too different from how duplicate content or very similar content can cause issues for ranking in traditional search. That is, because AI Search, on Bing and Google, are grounded by the same signals that are used in traditional search – having duplicate content can potentially cause confusion and blur intent signals. The issue with …

Ever clicked a link and landed on a “Page Not Found” error? Redirects prevent that. They send visitors and search engines to the right page automatically. Redirects are crucial for both SEO and user experience. For SEO, they preserve link equity and keep your rankings intact. Additionally, it enhances the user experience, as no one likes dead ends. Table of contents What is a redirect? How redirects work Why redirects matter When to use a redirect Types of redirects How redirects impact SEO Common redirect mistakes How to set up a redirect Troubleshooting redirects Conclusion about redirects Key takeaways A redirect automatically sends users …

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. …

Broad match used to mean “more reach, less relevance.” Now it means more reach, with a machine learning layer deciding what relevance looks like. Google has been steadily steering advertisers toward fewer moving parts – fewer match types, fewer manual levers, and more automation. Making broad match the default for new Search campaigns in July 2024 was the clearest signal yet that this is the direction of travel. If you still think of broad match as “the loosest match type,” you will manage it like it is 2016. That is where the pain comes from: CPC inflation, irrelevant search terms, and leads that look fine in Google Ads but do not survive contact wi…

In one of the most consequential regulatory moves yet for the future of search, the European Commission has launched a formal antitrust investigation into Google. At the center of the complaint is Google’s use of publisher content to train and power AI Overviews and other generative AI features – while potentially diverting traffic away from original sources. For anyone working in SEO, content strategy, or brand visibility, the implications are immediate. Is Google crossing a line by repurposing publisher content for AI-generated answers, or is this simply the cost of participating in an open, crawlable web? With regulators now stepping in, the industry …

Does it feel like your organic traffic is disappearing? You aren’t imagining it. AI Overviews and answer engines are sidelining classic SEO results. To stay visible, brands need to adapt – fast. The good news: you don’t need to rewrite your entire SEO playbook. With a few smart tweaks, you can shift from SEO to GEO and reclaim your share of search in the age of generative AI. GEO, or generative engine optimization, focuses on entities – not just pages. That means your brand, products, services, and experts. By strengthening these signals, you increase the chances your business is cited, referenced, and recommended inside AI-generated answers and conversationa…

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 Search Console seems to have fixed the weeks long delay with the search performance reports. For the past few weeks, we had 50+ hour delays for these reports, but as of the past several hours, the reports seem to be up-to-date. Now up-to-date. If you go to the search performance report, you should just see anywhere between about 2 – 6 hours of delay, which is typically normal. At some point over the past few weeks, the delays were over 70 hours. This is what I see: The delays started a few weeks ago and it took about three weeks to clear the delay and backlog of data. Page indexing report. Meanwhile, the page indexing report delay we reported ma…

Google has updated its JavaScript SEO basics documentation to clarify how Google’s crawler handles noindex tags in pages that use JavaScript. In short, if “you do want the page indexed, don’t use a noindex tag in the original page code,” Google wrote. What is new. Google updated this section to read: “When Google encounters the noindex tag, it may skip rendering and JavaScript execution, which means using JavaScript to change or remove the robots meta tag from noindex may not work as expected. If you do want the page indexed, don’t use a noindex tag in the original page code.” In the past, it read: “If Google encounters the noindex tag, it skips renderin…

Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, admitted that Google “for sure messed up” by underinvesting in AI and failing to seriously pursue the opportunity after releasing the research that led to today’s generative AI era. Driving the news. Google didn’t take it seriously enough and failed to scale fast enough after the Transformer paper, Brin said. Also: Google was “too scared to bring it to people” because chatbots can “say dumb things.” “OpenAI ran with it,” which was “a super smart insight.” The full quote. Brin said: “I guess I would say in some ways we for sure messed up in that we underinvested and sort of didn’t take it as seriously as we should have…

Google Ads introduced View-Through Conversion (VTC)–optimised bidding for Android App campaigns, giving advertisers a visible toggle to optimise toward conversions that happen after an ad is viewed, not clicked. Previously, VTC existed only as a hidden signal within Google’s systems. Now, it’s an explicit optimisation option. The shift. Google is continuing to move app advertising away from click-centric logic and toward incrementality and influence, especially for formats like YouTube and in-feed video. This update aligns bidding more closely with how users actually discover and install apps. Why we care. Advertisers can now bid beyond clicks, improvi…

Doing SEO well often means knowing what to focus on and when to do so. That is not always easy, especially when you are juggling content, updates, and day-to-day site management. That is why we are introducing a new SEO task list in the Yoast plugin. The Task List helps you improve your SEO step by step, directly inside your dashboard. It turns best practices into clear, actionable tasks, so you can make progress with confidence and without second-guessing your work. Why the SEO checklist matters: Turn SEO advice into clear actions Instead of vague recommendations or long documentation, the Task List shows you exactly what to do next. Each item fo…

Managing large catalogs in Google Performance Max can feel like handing the algorithm your wallet and hoping for the best. La Maison Simons faced that exact challenge: too many products and not enough control. Then they rebuilt their segmentation with Channable Insights and turned a “black box” campaign into a revenue-generating machine. Step 1: Stop segmenting by category Simons originally split campaigns by product category. It sounded logical – until their best-selling sweater ate the budget and newer or overlooked products never had a chance to surface. Static segmentation meant limited visibility and slow decisions. Marketers stayed stuck making m…

Shopify powers more than 6 million live ecommerce websites, supported by a robust app ecosystem that can extend nearly every part of the customer journey. Anyone can develop an app to perform virtually any function. But with so many integrations to choose from, ecommerce teams often waste time testing add-ons that promise revenue gains but fail to deliver. Having worked across a wide range of Shopify implementations, I’ve seen which tools consistently improve checkout completion, recover abandoned carts, and increase revenue. Based on that experience, I’ve organized the most effective integrations into three tiers by priority – so you can implement the …

We are navigating the “search everywhere” revolution – a disruptive shift driven by generative AI and large language models (LLMs) that is reshaping the relationship between brands, consumers, and search engines. For the last two decades, the digital economy ran on a simple exchange: content for clicks. With the rise of zero-click experiences, AI Overviews, and assistant-led research, that exchange is breaking down. AI now synthesizes answers directly on the SERP, often satisfying intent without a visit to a website. Platforms such as Gemini and ChatGPT are fundamentally changing how information is discovered. For enterprises, visibility increasingl…