SEO Tools and Resources

For years, marketers measured digital success through impressions, backlinks and clicks. If you ranked high in search results and won the click, you had visibility and control of the funnel. But that landscape is already shifting. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are rapidly becoming the first place decision-makers go for answers. These systems don’t return a page of links; they generate a synthesized response. Whether your brand is included, or ignored, in that answer increasingly determines your relevance in the buying journey. This changes the marketer’s playbook. Visibility is no longer only about ranking on Google. It’s…

For years, marketers measured digital success through impressions, backlinks and clicks. If you ranked high in search results and won the click, you had visibility and control of the funnel. But that landscape is already shifting. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are rapidly becoming the first place decision-makers go for answers. These systems don’t return a page of links; they generate a synthesized response. Whether your brand is included, or ignored, in that answer increasingly determines your relevance in the buying journey. This changes the marketer’s playbook. Visibility is no longer only about ranking on Google. It’s…

Most brands performing well in traditional local search fail to appear in results from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, according to SOCi’s newly released 2026 local visibility index. Also of note: business profile information was only about 68% accurate on ChatGPT and Perplexity, compared with 100% accuracy on Gemini, which is grounded in Google Maps. AI limits local visibility. Performance data from nearly 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands was analyzed to measure how often locations are surfaced or recommended by AI assistants. Turns out, AI platforms are far more selective than Google’s local results: 1.2% of locations were recommended…

Google has been layering AI into Search campaigns for years through features like Smart Bidding, Responsive Search Ads, and Performance Max. In May 2025, it announced the next step: AI Max. The feature is now rolling out globally in beta and appearing in many advertiser accounts. (If you don’t see it yet, expect it soon.) Here’s what it is, how it works, and what it means for your campaigns. What is AI Max for Search? AI Max is a feature within your existing Search campaign that you can toggle on or off. Enabling it provides targeting and creative enhancements in an automated way. According to Google, AI Max: Improves search term match…

Google’s AI Max for Search campaigns is changing how we run search ads. Launched in private beta as Search Max, the feature began rolling out globally in late May, with full availability expected by early Q3 2025. But will AI Max actually drive incremental growth or simply take credit for conversions your existing setup would have captured anyway? This article: Breaks down the key metrics to track in AI Max. Shares early results from travel, fashion, and B2B accounts. Includes a Google Ads script to make analysis faster and easier. Understanding AI Max Think of AI Max as Google combining the best parts of Dynamic Search Ads and Performance…

Google AI Max drives revenue but at a higher cost, according to Smarter Ecommerce’s Mike Ryan, who analyzed 250+ campaigns. Outcomes vary, and much more testing is still needed. Why we care. AI Max isn’t a minor update. It’s Google’s most significant reimagining of Search campaigns in years, shifting away from keyword syntax toward pure intent matching. For you, that’s both an opportunity (possible growth) and a risk (an efficiency tradeoff). By the numbers. The result of the analysis: Median revenue: +13% Median CPA: +16% ROAS range: +42% to -35% Advertisers who activate AI Max typically see 14% more conversions or conversion value at a similar…

A recent test run by the Adalysis team reveals that Google’s new AI Max setting is reshaping how search terms are matched and reported — creating blind spots for advertisers who rely on precise keyword control. When AI Max isn’t the right fit. AI Max isn’t inherently bad, but advertisers should think twice if: Broad match historically underperforms in your account. Your top exact/phrase match keywords are already constrained by budget. You prefer not to use text customization or Final URL expansion — both built-in components of AI Max. If you only need broad match, you can add those keywords manually and keep full control. How AI Max interacts with…

Google has released a detailed Q&A for advertisers to clarify how its new AI Max tool works, addressing key questions around performance, control, and automation in search advertising. With the rollout of AI Max, a suite of ad tools powered by generative AI and search intelligence, the company is pitching it as the future of automated, performance-driven search advertising. What it does AI Max uses Google AI to: Match your ads with more relevant searches – even ones you aren’t bidding on. Customize ad copy dynamically based on user intent. Send users to your most relevant landing pages automatically. Questions asked by advertisers, answered b…

As conversational search gains traction, the bigger question isn’t who has more users, but who can monetize them. Google enters this phase with a massive advantage: mature ad systems, deep advertiser adoption, and decades of optimization. Early AI Mode signals point to a measured rollout. The panic phase is over After a period of panic within the company, Google’s built-in advantages, coupled with massive capital expenditures, have helped it regain ground on category leader ChatGPT in LLM search. In December 2025, Google’s own code red became OpenAI’s code red. The dust will continue to settle, and analysts have different takes. But one signal stands o…

Want AI search engines and agents to find and use your content? Traditional SEO isn’t enough. AI systems process information differently. This guide breaks down key optimizations to help your content stay visible and rank in the AI era. TL;DR: Quick AI optimization checklist To optimize for AI search and agents: Make content accessible with clean HTML/markdown and good structure. Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt and firewall rules. Return content fast, with key info high up. Use semantic markup, metadata, and schemas. Create an llms.txt file. Check your content’s AI visibility. Traditional SEO vs. AI search: The key difference…

Visibility in Google’s AI Overviews doesn’t equal traffic. In my research from the first half of this year, AI Overview citations consistently underperformed – even compared to traditional blue links near the bottom of the SERP. An AI Overview citation can still help with authority, brand recall, positioning, and maybe even long-term LLM training. But for short-term clicks? The data paints a sobering picture. How AI Overviews vs. blue links compare: What the data shows Are AI Overview citations actually gathering clicks? Or are they just pushing the real click-producers further down the page? That question led me to look at the performance of cla…

Pages that rank for Google’s AI Overview “fan-out” queries are much more likely to be cited than those that rank only for the main search query, according to data from Surfer SEO. An analysis of 10,000 keywords found a strong correlation (Spearman 0.77) between how many fan-out queries a page ranks for and its likelihood of being cited in Google’s AI Overviews. By the numbers. Pages ranking for fan-out queries are 161% more likely to be cited than pages ranking only for the main query. Also: 76% of the sampled keywords triggered AI Overviews. 33,000 fan-out queries were extracted using Gemini. Pages ranking for both the main query and at least one fan-…

Users are visiting Google more often but staying less. That’s one of several insights from a new analysis by Kevin Indig, in partnership with Similarweb, based on 5 billion search queries and 20 million websites across the U.S., UK, and Germany. The big picture. In the U.S., visits to Google are up +9% since AI Overviews launched in May 2024. Also: Time on site and pages per visit are flat or falling across markets. Query length has barely changed. The numbers point to a new user pattern: more frequent visits, shorter sessions – a shift toward “resolve and leave” behavior, according to Indig. By the numbers. Google visits are up in the U.S.: U.S. …

When ChatGPT, Claude, or Google’s AI get asked for brand or product recommendations, they almost never return the same list twice — and almost never in the same order. That’s the big finding from a new study from Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SparkToro, and Patrick O’Donnell, CTO and co-founder of Gumshoe.ai. They investigated whether generative AI recommendations are sufficiently consistent to be measured. What they tested. Six hundred volunteers ran 12 identical prompts through ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s AI nearly 3,000 times. Each response was normalized into an ordered list of brands or products. The team then compared those lists for overlap, or…

As artificial intelligence integrates deeper into our workflows, understanding its vulnerabilities is critical. A recently exposed vulnerability known as Best-of-N (BoN) jailbreaking has redefined how we view AI safety. Here’s a breakdown of BoN jailbreaking, how the attack works, and why it creates real risk for your data, brand, and the AI tools you rely on. First, a quick vocabulary check Before getting into BoN, there are two terms you need to actually understand, not just nod at. Brute force attack: Imagine trying to crack a four-digit PIN by starting at 0000, then 0001, then 0002, all the way to 9999. No cleverness, no strategy, just trying every si…

Historically, Google Search has driven innovation by rewarding high-quality content with visibility and traffic. In the last article in this series, we talked about the risks of Google AI over-personalizing results and reinforcing filter bubbles. In this article, we’ll look at the opposite risk. If Google’s new AI results skew away from diversity and towards standardized results that favor big brands and consensus views, it could limit creativity and innovation and accelerate the commodification of the web. Some may find this concern naive because the internet is already very commodified, but historically, even small websites and businesses believed that they had…

Everyone is talking about AI search as if it’s already universal — as if we’ve collectively moved on, users have shifted and discovery has changed for everyone. But the reality is far less straightforward. While AI search is growing fast, it isn’t being adopted evenly. The gap is increasingly shaped by something we don’t often discuss in search: household income. AI adoption isn’t equal — and the gap is widening My agency has been tracking how people search since early 2025. In our latest wave, we introduced a new lens: household income. What we found was a clear and significant divide. Overall, around 27% of people say they use ChatGPT regularly. But when …

Reddit ranks as the most-cited domain in AI-generated answers, followed by YouTube and LinkedIn, based on a new analysis of 30 million sources by Peec AI, an AI search analytics tool. The findings. Reddit was the most-cited source across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and Forbes also ranked in the top five. Review platforms like Yelp and G2 appeared often in recommendation queries. The research showed which domains models rely on: ChatGPT favored Wikipedia, Reddit, and editorial sites like Forbes. Google leaned toward platforms like Facebook and Yelp. Perplexity emphasized Reddit, LinkedIn,…

AI search engines and chatbots often provide wrong answers and make up article citations, according to a new study from Columbia Journalism Review. Why we care. AI search tools have ramped up the scraping of your content so they can serve answers to their users, often resulting in no clicks to your website. Also, click-through rates from AI search and chatbots are much lower than Google Search, according to a separate, unrelated study. But hallucinating citations makes an already bad situation even worse. By the numbers. More than half of the responses from Gemini and Grok 3 cited fabricated or broken URLs that led to error pages. Also, according to the study: …

People are adopting AI as a complement to classic search, not a full replacement, according to a new survey by digital marketing agency Higher Visibility: 71.5% reported using AI tools for search; 14% use them daily. 79.8% prefer Google or Microsoft Bing for general information searches. 20.2% have changed their primary search platform within the last year. Why we care. Classic search engines still dominate – but we also know it is becoming more challenging as Google click-through rates are declining. However, AI answer engines and tools, social media platforms (like Instagram and TikTok), and shopping platforms all play a role in today’s messy search land…

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 …

Everyone’s talking about “AI search” (AI SEO, GEO, AEO, or whatever you call it) – and everyone’s convinced they’re right. Some say SEO is dead. Others say nothing’s really changed (“it’s just SEO”). The truth? Search is evolving fast, but SEO fundamentals still matter. What’s shifting is where people discover information – and how machines decide what to trust. Here are a few myths worth retiring. Myth 1: “GEO is just SEO with a new name.” Reality: The fundamentals overlap, but the target has changed. SEO is about ranking webpages. AI search is about being cited, trusted, or chosen inside an answer. You’re not trying to win Position 1…

We need to have a talk about KPIs and AI search. I’ve observed numerous SEO professionals on LinkedIn and at conferences talking about “ranking No. 1 on ChatGPT” as if it’s the equivalent of a No. 1 ranking on Google: On Google, being the first result is often a golden ticket. Going from No. 2 to No. 1 in Google search will often result in 100%-300% increases in traffic and conversions. This is almost certainly not the case with AI responses – even if they weren’t constantly changing. Our team’s research shows AI users consider an average of 3.7 businesses before deciding who to contact. Being the first result in that list on ChatGPT isn’t the g…

A dominant share – 86% to be specific – of AI citations come from sources brands already control, according to a new analysis of 6.8 million citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity conducted by brand visibility platform Yext. Why we care. The findings challenge the perception that forums like Reddit dominate AI answers. Yext’s analysis also suggests that brands can directly influence visibility in generative results by keeping website content accurate, structured, and crawlable. (Yes, SEO.) By the numbers. Across all industries, 86% of AI citations came from sources brands owned or managed. Websites lead: 44% of citations came from first-party sites.…

AI may not see your brand the way you think it does, according to Scott Stouffer, co-founder and CTO at Market Brew. Brands still publish content, optimize pages, build authority, and follow SEO best practices. But that may not be enough anymore. Search has moved away from a simple battle over keywords, links, and page-level signals. It’s now shaped by meaning, intent, embeddings, and retrieval, Stouffer said during his SEO Week presentation. In legacy SEO, a page could rank lower and still exist in the search results. In AI-driven systems, the first question isn’t whether you rank. It’s whether you’re ever retrieved. “If you’re not retrieved, you do not …