SEO Tools and Resources

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…

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…

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 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…

There’s no such thing as “too much information” in AI search. The more detail you provide, the less likely your business is to be replaced by third-party sources — or left out entirely. With the rise of AI search, we know users want answers, and they want them fast. Google Maps has Know before you go and Ask Maps about this place (not to be confused with Ask Maps, the new conversational “AI Mode” in Google Maps), both AI features that let users easily find information about a place without visiting their website or social media. Merchant Center added a new feature, Business Agent, that allows shoppers to chat with brands. Business Agent pulls from the business’s p…

Google is giving retailers more firepower to promote loyalty program benefits directly within product listings — expanding the program internationally and into its newest AI-powered shopping experiences. What’s new. Merchants can now highlight member pricing and exclusive shipping options directly on listings. Loyalty annotations have also expanded to local inventory ads and regional Shopping ads — making it easier to promote in-store or geography-specific perks. Why we care. The more you can personalize an offer for a shopper, the better. Embedding member perks into the moment of purchase discovery — rather than requiring a separate loyalty app or webpage — m…

A newly published, unverified report claims Google’s Gemini AI is instructed to mirror user tone and validate emotions in its responses. Why we care. If accurate, AI-generated search responses may vary based on how a query is phrased — not just the information available. What’s new. The report centers on a previously undisclosed internal structure referred to as upcast_info, which appears to contain system-level instructions guiding how Gemini responds. The report, published by Elie Berreby, head of SEO and AI search at Adorama, suggested that Gemini is instructed to: Match the user’s tone, energy, and intent. Validate emotions before responding. Delive…

Eligible Yoast customers can now run a free Yoast AI Brand Insights scan and get a personalized report showing how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini see your brand. Your brand is part of the AI conversation whether you’re monitoring it or not. Yoast AI Brand Insights, part of the Yoast SEO AI+ plan gives you visibility into what AI tools say about you, how often you appear, and whether the picture they paint matches reality. To help you see that for yourself, we’re offering eligible customers a free, one-time scan. What you’ll see Your AI Visibility Index: a clear score showing how present your brand is across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini Sentiment analysis:…

Google once attributed two of Barry Schwartz’s Search Engine Land articles to me — a misclassification at the annotation layer that briefly rewrote authorship in Google’s systems. For a few days, when you searched for certain Search Engine Land articles Schwartz had written, Google listed me as the author. The articles appeared in my entity’s publication list and were connected to my Knowledge Panel. What happened illustrates something the SEO industry has almost entirely overlooked: that annotation — not the content itself — is the key to what users see and thus your success. How Google annotated the page and got the author wrong Googlebot crawled those pa…

Google is rolling out new Google Maps features that make it easier to contribute photos, reviews, and local insights, while adding Gemini-powered caption suggestions. Local Guides redesign. Contributor profiles are getting more visibility. Total points now appear more prominently, Local Guide levels are easier to spot, and badge designs have been refreshed. Top contributors will also stand out more in reviews with new gold profile indicators. AI caption drafts. Google is also introducing AI-generated caption drafts. Gemini analyzes selected images and suggests text you can edit or discard. Caption suggestions are available in English on iOS in the U.…

Over 30% of outbound clicks go to just 10 domains, with Google alone taking more than 20%, according to a new Semrush study published today. ChatGPT also relies less on the live web, triggering search on 34.5% of queries, down from 46% in late 2024. The big picture. ChatGPT’s growth has plateaued, and its role in how users navigate the web is evolving unevenly. Referral traffic from ChatGPT grew 206%, comparing January 2025 to January 2026. The details. Most ChatGPT referral traffic still goes to a small set of sites, even as more sites receive some traffic. Google accounts for 21.6% of all ChatGPT referral traffic. The next nine domains bring the…

Google’s legal troubles over its search and ad tech businesses are entering a new phase — one that could expose the company to billions in payouts from advertisers seeking damages after U.S. courts found it illegally monopolized key digital ad markets. Driving the news. A growing group of advertisers is preparing to file mass arbitration claims against Google, according to attorney Ashley Keller, who said the first filings are expected this week. Keller says he has already signed up a “significant number” of advertisers. He estimates potential claims tied to online search and display advertising could exceed $218 billion, based on economic analysis his firm co…

Open ChatGPT, then search for a local business you know has a strong online presence. Ask for a recommendation in that category. Chances are, it comes up. If you check what the AI cites as sources, you’ll almost certainly find the business’s own website in the mix. That tells you something important: AI doesn’t conjure answers out of thin air. It pulls from whatever it can find. If your website isn’t the best, most complete, most authoritative source of information about your business, the AI will assemble its answer from scraps. You lose control of your own narrative. That’s what’s driving a growing question among business owners and marketers: “Do I even need a …

If your law firm’s referrals aren’t converting, validation may be the problem. Referred prospects don’t go straight from recommendation to contact. They research, compare, and verify what they were told — on your website, in search results, and through AI tools. These are your highest-value leads — pre-sold through trusted recommendations and expected to be your easiest conversions. But when that validation falls short, even they lose momentum. This is the referral validation gap: the moments during online research when trust is broken rather than built. Here’s where referral validation fails and how to fix it. While this article focuses on law firms, t…

Apple is preparing to introduce sponsored listings in Apple Maps, marking a significant expansion of its advertising business beyond the App Store. How it will work. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the system will function similarly to Google Maps — allowing retailers and brands to bid for ad slots against search queries. Sponsored businesses will appear in Maps search results, much like sponsored apps already appear in App Store searches. The timeline. An announcement could come as early as this month, with ads beginning to appear inside Maps as early as this summer across iPhone, other Apple devices, and the web version. Why Apple is doing this. Advert…

AI tools and visibility have dominated the SEO conversation in the past two years. But while discussions focus on these new technologies, most of the biggest SEO risks in 2026 will come from somewhere else: within your own organization. Fragmented data, unclear ownership, outdated KPIs, and weak collaboration can quietly destroy even the best strategies. As SEO expands beyond the website and into AI-driven discovery, the role of the SEO team is becoming broader, more influential, and, paradoxically, harder to define. Here are some of the risks your team should start thinking about now. Relying too much on AI for everything Many SEO teams now rely on AI for …

A new creative feature has been spotted inside Google Ads Performance Max campaigns — and it could change how advertisers without video budgets approach animated display advertising. What was found. Vice President of Search at JumpFly, Inc. Nikki Kuhlman spotted an option to generate animated video clips directly within PMax asset groups, using AI to enhance and animate a single source image. How it works. Upload a source image — a logo, a product shot, a property photo AI generates several “enhanced” versions of that image Each enhanced image produces two animated clips Select up to five animated clips per asset group Note: faces cannot be us…

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…

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…

Heidi Sturrock, a paid search consultant with 24 years of industry experience, joined me on a recent episode of PPC Live The Podcast. The episode covers a broad match mistake with an unexpected silver lining, and Heidi’s experience testing AI Max across 50+ accounts. The broad match mistake — and the unexpected silver lining Early in her career, Heidi ran a competitor conquest campaign for a high-spending B2B SaaS client using broad match — without adding negative keywords — and launched it on a Friday with a large daily budget. Over the weekend, the client’s call centre was flooded with angry calls from the competitor’s customers looking for refunds and tech suppo…

AI search engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity are changing how consumers discover and purchase products online. If your product pages aren’t optimized for these AI assistants, you could be missing out on a growing source of traffic and revenue. The challenge? AI assistants don’t evaluate product pages in the same way traditional search engines do. They need to fully understand your products so they can confidently recommend them to different users with different needs. To help you assess how well your product pages are optimized for AI search, here’s a simple scorecard covering the six most important factors. 1. Product specifications Does…

For most people, “Mad Men” means the TV show. But the phrase points to something more specific: Madison Avenue in the 1950s and ‘60s, when agencies grew brands through persuasion, positioning, and earned trust in a world of scarce media channels and powerful gatekeepers. If you wanted attention, you bought your way in, then made your product the obvious choice. When the internet arrived and Google made the chaos navigable, an entire industry was built on getting brands found. Search and SEO became one of the most commercially valuable disciplines in marketing. That model isn’t disappearing. But something new is taking shape on top of it — and most of the industry …

Google has begun placing sponsored ad units directly inside the Images tab of mobile search results — a new placement that eligible campaigns can access without any changes to existing keyword targeting. What’s happening. When a user navigates to the Images tab within Google Search on mobile, they may now see sponsored units appearing within the image grid. Each unit shows a full image creative as the primary visual alongside text, and is clearly labelled “Sponsored” — consistent with how Google labels ads elsewhere in search results. How it works. Eligible campaigns can serve into the Images tab without any changes to keyword targeting or campaign structure. The …

The March 2026 core update finished rolling out today after 12 days and 4 hours, completing Google’s first broad ranking update of the year. What happened. Google confirmed the rollout ended at 06:12 PDT, per its Search Status Dashboard. The update began March 27 and impacted search rankings globally. Google previously said this was “a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.” The timeline. Google originally estimated the March 2026 core update would take up to two weeks to complete. Started: March 27. Completed: April 8. Total rollout: 12 days, 4 hours The context. This was t…

Ask most ecommerce brands who owns their product feed, and the answer is almost always the same: the paid media team. Maybe a feed management tool sits under PPC. Maybe the shopping team built the feed years ago, and nobody’s touched the titles since. Either way, SEO rarely has a seat at the table, and it’s often forgotten as part of the broader feed management strategy. Whether you’re worried about AI search or traditional clicks, you’re missing out on opportunities by excluding SEO from your feed management strategy. AI shopping results are grounded in Google Shopping data Up to 83% of ChatGPT carousel products match Google Shopping’s organic results, ac…