SEO Tools and Resources

Despite all the shiny new capabilities at our disposal, many professionals seem stuck in a cycle of “AI Groundhog Day.” You open a chat window, carefully craft a prompt, paste in your context, and get a great result. An hour later, you do it all over again. If this is how you use AI to automate, you’re still doing manual work — you’re just doing it in a chat box. To move from using AI to building with it, you need to shift from a human doer to a true human orchestrator. That means stopping one-off prompts and starting to build systems. In this new phase of AI automation, what you really need are AI skills. I explore this shift in my new book, “The AI Amplifie…

Topical authority is a key concept in SEO, but it doesn’t account for how search and AI systems choose between competing sources. The missing layer isn’t in content or structure. It’s in the signals that determine selection once a topic is understood — the difference between being eligible and being chosen. Topical authority explains content, not selection Topical authority is foundational for SEO and now AEO and AAO. But the framework the industry calls topical authority is incomplete. It covers semantics, content, and structure, but that’s just one part of a three-row, nine-cell model that defines topical ownership. Topical authority describes what you’v…

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…

A growing number of advertisers say their Google Ads campaigns were suddenly hit with mass disapprovals tied to DNS and 500 server errors — even when their sites appeared to be working normally. The issue is raising fresh concerns about platform reliability and the risk of sudden performance disruptions. Driving the news. PPC advertisers began flagging widespread problems this week across Google Ads accounts, with multiple agency leaders saying clients were affected at the same time. Managing Director at Cornerhouse Media, Ryan Berry, said more than 1,500 ads were disapproved in a single account around 1:30 p.m. UTC. Others said they received overnight emails …

A major shift is underway in digital advertising: Meta Platforms is projected to generate more ad revenue than Google in 2026, signaling how marketers are increasingly favoring automated, performance-driven platforms. Driving the news. According to Emarketer, Meta is expected to bring in $243.46 billion in global ad revenue this year, narrowly topping Google’s projected $239.54 billion. Meta is forecast to capture 26.8% of global ad spend. Google is projected to take 26.4%. It would be the first time Google has lost the top spot in digital ad revenue. Why we care. Meta’s growth suggests brands are getting more value from automated, performance-focused t…

At $50+ CPCs, Reddit beats every vendor organically 67.3% of the time across 8,566 keywords. The study from Ross Simmonds and his team focused on B2B SaaS, but the underlying dynamics don’t stop there. The higher the advertising competition on a term, the more likely a Reddit thread sits above every brand in organic results. If you’re in legal, financial services, premium home services, or insurance, those CPCs aren’t unusual territory. This study is worth your attention. The SEO community has been talking about this for a while, and the conversation has largely stayed in SEO territory: Reddit is eating organic search, so build your glossaries and invest in …

Roll the clock back five, 10, or 15 years, and a PPC practitioner’s value was directly tied to tactical proficiency. Not anymore. Today, Google and Microsoft automate much of the tactical work. Machine learning and AI manage bids, test creatives, and find audiences faster and more efficiently than any human could. Unfortunately, this reality has left many veteran practitioners in a mid-career identity crisis. If algorithms pull the levers, what exactly are we getting paid to do? Where is our sustainable value to the business? Here’s what that evolution looks like in practice and how the hard skills in your playbook have changed. PPC shifted from tactical e…

Google has posted that it may now use your search spam reports for manual actions and that the text used in those spam reports may be sent along “verbatim” to the site owner being reported. What Google said. Google wrote it has “Clarified that Google may use spam report submissions to take manual action against violations.” The new text says: “Ranking manipulation techniques that attempt to compromise the quality of Google’s search results violate our spam policies and can negatively impact a site’s ranking. Google may use your report to take manual action against violations. If we issue a manual action, we send whatever you write in the submission report ve…

Google is retiring legacy Search automation tools, including Dynamic Search Ads (DSA), in favor of AI Max, its broader AI-powered campaign suite. This will affect you if you use DSA, automatically created assets (ACA), or campaign-level broad match settings. Driving the news. AI Max for Search campaigns is exiting beta after adoption by “hundreds of thousands” of advertisers globally, Google said. Starting in September, eligible campaigns using DSA, ACA, or campaign-level broad match will be automatically migrated to AI Max. Google will stop allowing advertisers to create new DSA campaigns through Google Ads, Ads Editor, and the Ads API once automatic upgrades…

There’s a phrase PPC experts reach for whenever they get a tough question. At conferences, online, and on client calls. Two words, a smug smile, and absolutely zero useful information: “It depends.” This has been bugging me for as long as I can remember. Turns out it’s not just a PPC thing, either. Aleyda Solis gave an excellent presentation calling out the exact same pattern in SEO. So we’re dealing with an industry-wide epidemic here. Two disciplines, same cop-out. Not every question is equally hard to answer. “What’s the maximum number of RSAs per ad group?” Just look it up. “Why did my CPA spike last week?” That takes data plus interpretation. “Wh…

Addy Osmani, a director of engineering at Google Cloud AI, published new guidance on Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO), a model for making content usable by AI agents. He positioned this AEO (not to be confused with Answer Engine Optimization) as parallel to SEO, built for systems that fetch, parse, and act on content autonomously. What he’s seeing. AI agents collapse multi-step browsing into a single request. They don’t scroll, click, or engage with UI — they extract what they need instantly. That makes most traditional engagement metrics irrelevant. The token problem. Osmani highlighted token limits as a core constraint shaping content performance. Large pag…

In the early days of the web and my career, web architecture was simple: we built “filing cabinet” websites designed around a single, grand entryway. Visitors arrived at your homepage, a.k.a. the “front door,” and navigated through the site to find what they needed. Then SEO came along and changed everything. Suddenly, every page became a possible entrance point, and people could be dropped in directly at the page most relevant to their current need. But today, in this AI environment, it seems that things are changing again. As users now use AI tools like Gemini, ChatGPT, and likely mass-adoption tools embedded in our mobile devices, search engines, and browsers t…

Google is giving advertisers more control when appealing disapproved ads in bulk — a small but meaningful update that could save time and reduce accidental resubmissions. Driving the news. Google has added a new option in its bulk ad review workflow that lets advertisers select ads from specific campaigns when requesting a policy re-review. Previously, advertisers appealing disapproved ads in bulk often had to resubmit all eligible ads across an account — including older campaigns that hadn’t been updated. That created extra work and could clutter the review process with ads that weren’t actually fixed. What’s new. Advertisers can now click a new “Sele…

Automation doesn’t fail on its own — it does exactly what it’s trained to do. The problem is that when Google Ads is fed incomplete, misaligned, or overly broad signals, it can optimize toward the wrong outcome faster than most advertisers realize. In our second installment of SMX Now, our new monthly series, Ameet Khabra of Hop Skip Media will break down a real account where a 417% jump in conversions turned out to be the wrong kind of success. She’ll use that case study to explain the four key ways automation drift enters an account: signal drift, query drift, inventory drift, and creative drift. You’ll leave with a practical framework for diagnosing drift early…

The March 2026 Google core update drove far higher ranking volatility than the December 2025 core update. Nearly 80% of top-three results shifted, and almost one in four top-10 pages fell out of the top 100, according to SE Ranking data shared exclusively with Search Engine Land. The data. Volatility increased across every ranking tier. In the top 3, 79.5% of URLs changed positions, up from 66.8% in December. In the top 10, 90.7% shifted, compared to 83.1%. Stability dropped sharply. Only 20.5% of top 3 URLs held their exact position, down from 33.1%. In the top 10, that fell to 9.3%, from 16.9%. Churn intensified at the top. About 24.1% of …

Paid search success used to be driven by optimizations. You adjusted bids, restructured campaigns, refined match types, and added negatives. Performance moved accordingly. That’s still how many accounts are managed. When I audit them, they often look “well optimized”: active management, no glaring structural deficiencies, and targets that match achieved ROAS. On paper, everything checks out. But performance is quietly stuck. Google Ads no longer responds to isolated optimizations. It builds on what you’ve been rewarding. So when I hear, “That didn’t work,” it usually means the change didn’t override months of prior signals. What most advertisers still call opt…

One of the biggest challenges in AI search is that visibility is being shaped by systems you can’t directly observe. Nothing like Google Search Console exists for ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. No reporting layer showing what’s crawled, how often, or whether your content is considered at all. Yet these systems are actively crawling the web, building datasets, powering retrieval, and generating answers that shape discovery — often without sending traffic back to the source. This creates a gap. In traditional SEO, performance and behavior are connected. You can see impressions, clicks, indexing, and some level of crawl data. In AI search, that feedback loop doe…

Google has unique policies for Google Shopping that are stricter than its general advertising policies. If Google thinks you’ve violated any of them, it can suspend your Merchant Center. That cuts off access to Google Shopping, Local Inventory Ads, product feeds in Performance Max and dynamic remarketing, and free listings for products. That means losing your highest-ROI channel overnight. Here’s how Google’s system works — and what you can do to fix suspensions and get back online. Case study: How we reinstated a suspended Merchant Center A UK-based ecommerce retailer came to us after their Google Merchant Center account was suspended for “Misrepresentatio…

AI is changing search and rewriting the rules. If your brand isn’t visible in AI-generated answers, you have a bigger problem than just traffic. You’re missing out on trust, credibility, and customers who now expect AI to recommend the best options everywhere. Table of contents Why modern SEO is about AI visibility AI search is a blind spot for most Controlling the narrative of your brand Yoast AI Brand Insights is here to help Understanding the AI visibility metrics 5 Ways to improve your AI brand visibility How to influence LLMs to mention your brand The future of brand visibility is AI-driven Ready to take control of your AI brand visibility? We see that …

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 …

Google is leaning harder on Gemini to police its ad ecosystem, saying the AI upgrade sharply improved scam detection while reducing false suspensions for legitimate advertisers. The numbers also show how fast ad safety is becoming an AI arms race. Driving the news. In its 2025 Ads Safety Report, Google said it blocked or removed 8.3 billion ads globally and suspended 24.9 million advertiser accounts last year. More than 99% of policy-violating ads were stopped before they were ever shown, according to the company. Google also said Gemini helped: cut incorrect advertiser suspensions by 80%, process 4x more user reports than the prior year, and catch scam…

Google announced updates to Chrome that let searchers use AI Mode in a more “engaging” and “deeper” way. Chrome lets you do all of this without switching tabs and potentially losing your place. What is new. Chrome added these new features: (1) Search side-by-side: When you’re using AI Mode in Chrome desktop, clicking a link will open the webpage side-by-side with AI Mode. This makes it easier to visit relevant websites, compare details, and ask follow-up questions while maintaining the context of your search. Here is what it looks like: (2) Search across your tabs: On Chrome desktop or mobile, you can tap the new “plus” menu on the New Tab page (or t…

ChatGPT citations favor pages that rank well, match the query in their headings, and stay tightly focused, according to an AirOps study of 16,851 queries. The top retrieval result was cited 58% of the time, and pages that answered the main query more narrowly outperformed broader, more comprehensive guides. Why we care. This study clarifies how to earn ChatGPT citations: win retrieval, mirror the query in your headings, and answer one question extremely well. In this study, that mattered more than breadth. The findings. Retrieval rank was the strongest signal. Pages in the top search position were cited 58.4% of the time, versus 14.2% for pages in position 10. …

Microsoft Advertising is rolling out a slate of updates aimed at making Performance Max campaigns easier to manage, measure, and migrate — especially for advertisers already using Google Ads. Driving the news. Microsoft now lets advertisers import Google PMax campaigns that use new customer acquisition (NCA) goals, a feature that has been generally available in Microsoft since early this year. The update is now live for all advertisers. That means marketers can more easily port over campaigns designed to prioritize first-time buyers without rebuilding them from scratch. What’s new. Microsoft says imported Google PMax campaigns with NCA goals will carry ove…

Sometimes the keywords you need to rank for are the ones you’re not allowed to use. Whether it’s trademark restrictions, brand guidelines, or industry stigma, you might be asked to capture demand without using the exact terms people search. Here’s how to navigate that challenge, align with search behavior, and still build visibility. When the keyword you need is off-limits It’s a common scenario in SEO: “We want to rank for (insert super competitive search term),” and, in the next breath, “Don’t use (that exact same phrase) on the page.” My very first SEO job, over 10 years ago, set the goal of ranking in the top 3 for the term “custom koozies.” I’ve…