SEO Tools and Resources

Microsoft Advertising is expanding its Performance Max reporting with publisher-level conversion and spend data — giving advertisers more visibility into where results are actually coming from What’s happening. According to Microsoft Ads Product liaison Navah Hopkins, the PMax Website Publisher URL report now includes conversion and spend metrics, moving beyond basic placement visibility into actionable performance data. This gives advertisers clearer insight into which placements are driving real outcomes — not just impressions or clicks. Why we care. This update gives advertisers visibility into which placements are actually driving conversions and spend…

Think about the last time you binged those true crime documentaries. The next time you opened your streaming app, the homepage likely shifted. Investigative series rose to the top. Maybe a notification alerted you when a new series dropped. Promotional emails highlighted only what you hadn’t watched. You didn’t see the data parsing or the decisioning behind it. You just looked forward to enjoying the next title. That’s the standard. According to the Adobe 2025 AI and digital trends report , 71% of consumers want personalized — or personally relevant — offers and information, and 78% expect seamless experiences across channels. Yet fewer than half of brands consistentl…

Paid search platforms are getting better at deciding who should see your ads, often without relying on the keywords you choose. As that shift accelerates, optimization is moving away from query-level control and toward signals like audience data, landing page context, and conversion behavior. Understanding that change is key to knowing what to actually optimize for now. When keywords gave us control and what comes next A decade ago, our world was defined by the illusion of control. Every decision we made was anchored in the keyword. Hypersegmentation and single keyword ad groups (SKAGs) ruled the land. If possible, we’d build a unique landing page for eve…

If you’re reading this, you’re likely an SEO aficionado like me. I’m a seasoned SEO with 10+ years of agency experience. Being on the agency side gave me deep SEO expertise, exposure to top industry talent, and experience working with some of the world’s most well-known brands. I did a bit of everything on the agency side — from technical SEO to content marketing to new business. Working at an agency is nothing like working in-house. After a long run on the agency side, I moved in-house for the first time. Here are seven things I’ve learned since making the switch. 1. Owning performance changes how SEO is evaluated On the agency side, when performance d…

Watch this video on Vimeo On PPC Live The Podcast, I spoke with Peter Bowen, a Google Ads specialist with nearly 20 years of experience and a strong focus on B2B lead generation. Pete shared two major lessons from his career: always check the basics, and never assume the systems around your ads are working just because the campaigns look fine. The currency mistake that cost 10 times the budget Pete Bowen shared an early mistake where a South African client’s account was set up in the UK, defaulting the currency to pounds instead of rand. That simple oversight led to spending roughly 10 times the intended budget, delivering great results at first — but u…

From today, your AI tools, dashboards, and automated workflows can now talk directly to Yoast SEO, thanks to the new Abilities API, built to work hand in hand with WordPress 6.9 .As WordPress evolves, we evolve with it, and the release of the Yoast SEO Abilities API is an extension of these new capabilities. What does that mean in plain English? If you use AI assistants, automated workflows, or custom dashboards, they can now automatically find and read your Yoast content scores, without anyone needing to build a custom connection or dig through documentation. It just works. What can these tools see? Once connected, any compatible tool can instantly pull…

If your paid social campaigns aren’t converting, you may be undervaluing their impact. Your brand’s exposure on social media can influence other parts of your marketing that platform metrics don’t capture. Here’s how to design and measure a test to understand how paid social influences your other marketing channels, including PPC. Step 1: Determine your hypothesis Start with what you want to learn, then define a hypothesis you can realistically evaluate with your data. For example, this is a common hypothesis for measuring paid search lift from social traffic: Search lift hypothesis: Increasing spend on social media will increase brand search volume an…

Ranking and visibility are no longer the same thing. For 20 years, SEO teams optimized for SERP position. Higher rankings meant more visibility, more clicks, and more traffic. That relationship is breaking down. Earlier this year, Ahrefs found that only 38% of pages cited in Google AI Overviews also ranked in the traditional top 10. Eight months earlier, that number was 76%. The implication is straightforward: being highly ranked no longer guarantees being seen. In AI-generated answers, visibility is determined by inclusion — and by how your brand is represented when it appears. That representation is determined by a different set of signals. How visib…

Ask any paid search manager who has tried to get an AI agent to do something genuinely useful with a Google Ads account and you will hear a version of the same story. They exported performance data, pasted it into a chat window, got a solid answer, and then did the exact same thing the next day. Exporting, pasting, repeating — that isn’t automation. That’s the same manual work you were doing before, performed in a different window. The AI tools are not the problem. Any of the major ones can do solid analysis when the right data is in front of them. The problem is getting that data to them live, current, and without a human in the middle copying it across. It’…

For more than two decades (nearly as long as I’ve been in SEO), backlinks have been core to SEO. Google’s PageRank changed search by using backlinks as a proxy for trust. A link wasn’t just a pathway; it was a vote. The more votes you had and the more authoritative the voters were, the higher you ranked. But as Google and AI systems matured, entity-based understanding emerged. AI models became better at understanding content, context, and credibility without always needing a hyperlink as a crutch. Today, visibility isn’t driven solely by links. It’s strengthened by the broader signals your brand has earned: how often it’s mentioned, cited, and trusted across …

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 …

Across 90 prompts we tested in ChatGPT, commercial prompts triggered web searches 78.3% of the time. Informational prompts did so just 3.1%. That gap changes what you should write if you want to appear in a ChatGPT answer. ChatGPT doesn’t pull every response from the same place. Some answers come from training data; others use live web search — a behavior called query fan-out. The model expands your prompt into multiple background searches, then retrieves and synthesizes across those subtopics. If your page isn’t on those branches, it won’t be pulled in. So the question is no longer just how to rank. It’s which pages open the fan-out door in the first place. …

Google’s Preferred Sources now supports all languages, not just the English language. “Preferred Sources is now rolling out globally in all supported languages,” Google wrote on its blog this morning. “This feature gives you more control over the news you see on Search by letting you choose the outlets and sites you want to appear more often in Top Stories,” Google added. In December, Google rolled out preferred sources globally but it only supported English. Now it supports all languages globally as well. Stats. Google added some interesting data including: “Readers are twice as likely to click through to a site after marking it as a Preferred Source”…

Google is filling a key measurement gap between awareness and consideration, giving advertisers a clearer view of how their brand is actually perceived — not just remembered. What’s new. Google Ads has introduced a new “Association” metric within Brand Lift Studies. Advertisers can define a concept, category or attribute, and Google will ask users a survey-style question: which brands they associate with that specific idea. How it works. Instead of measuring simple recall, the metric evaluates whether audiences connect your brand to a desired positioning. That could mean “premium,” “sustainable,” or even a product category — offering a more nuanced read on brand p…

In our Rethinking SEO in the age of AI article, we briefly explored how AI might move beyond simple prompt-and-response interactions. One emerging direction is agentic AI. Systems that can take action, not just generate answers. While this space is still evolving, we’re already seeing early signs of tools that can identify gaps, suggest improvements, and adapt to changing trends with minimal input. If these capabilities continue to develop, they could reshape how we think about maintaining continuous discoverability in SEO. Table of contents Understanding the coexistence of web and AI agents What will SEO mean in agentic web? Role of agentic AI in SEO Understanding …

Google is doubling down on AI-driven ads just as search behavior shifts toward conversational queries, giving advertisers more automation while trying to preserve control. What’s new. AI Max expands beyond Search: Now rolling out to Shopping campaigns and travel-specific formats, broadening reach across more advertiser types. AI Brief (powered by Gemini): A new interface that lets advertisers steer AI using natural language inputs. Text disclaimers + URL automation: Compliance-friendly updates to pair with automated landing page selection. Why we care. Google is making AI Max a core layer across Search, Shopping and Travel, meaning automa…

I keep hearing people say AI understands their brand. It doesn’t. Let’s get that out of the way first. What it does is pattern-match at scale. It compresses your positioning, product, proof, and tone into a bundle of signals it can retrieve and remix at speed. Those patterns come from two places: Training: What the model absorbed historically. Retrieval: What it can fetch at answer time from the live web and other sources. So “AI SEO” isn’t a new channel. It’s a new representation problem: which version of your brand gets encoded, retrieved, and repeated. Most brands are already in the game. They’re just not playing with purpose. The internet i…

The difference between a 2% margin and a 20% margin increasingly comes down to whether you’re renting attention or owning the answer. For years, search rewarded the ability to buy visibility. That model is weakening. As AI systems increasingly resolve queries without a click, the value shifts from traffic acquisition to answer formation. When you move from buying clicks to engineering answers (i.e., structuring content so it can be surfaced, cited, and trusted by AI systems), you change what you own. Instead of renting placement, you build answer equity: durable inclusion in the outputs that shape decisions. The goal isn’t to turn off paid search. It’s to…

The trial is live, limited to the U.S. for now, and moving faster than you likely expected. ChatGPT ads launched Feb. 9 for logged-in users on Free and Go tiers, with 600+ advertisers already in. With 800 million weekly active users, a global rollout of ChatGPT ads is a matter of when, not if. OpenAI has confirmed the next expansion to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The latest update from Adthena trialists suggests the UK could see ads as early as mid-May. We’ve tracked ChatGPT ad placements since rollout. With an index of 50,000+ daily placements across B2B software, ecommerce, fintech, and consumer verticals, we’ve had a front-row view of how this for…

Over the past few years, Performance Max has gone from an opaque experiment to a more capable — though still imperfect — campaign type for B2B marketers. The fundamentals haven’t changed: skepticism still matters, first-party data is critical, experimentation is non-negotiable, and actionable reporting drives optimization. What has changed is how much better Google has gotten at operationalizing those inputs. That means your Performance Max strategy needs to adapt. Here are five best practices for running more effective PMax campaigns for B2B today. 1. Guide AI with the right inputs In 2022, given the automated nature of PMax campaigns and the aggressive wa…

Google is enforcing a hard cutoff for older API versions, meaning advertisers and developers who don’t upgrade risk losing access to critical campaign management tools. What’s happening. Google Ads API v20 will officially sunset on June 10, 2026. From that date onward, all requests to v20 will fail, requiring migration to a newer version to maintain uninterrupted API access. Why we care. If you rely on the Google Ads API and don’t upgrade in time, automated workflows — including reporting, bidding and campaign management — could suddenly stop working. This could lead to data gaps, performance issues and operational disruption. Migrating early ensures continuity an…

Editor’s note: This research was conducted by Exploding Topics, the trend discovery platform owned by Semrush, and is republished here with permission. Data is drawn from a proprietary survey of 1,009 US consumers. Full methodology appears at the end of this article. More than three in four consumers have used AI to help with shopping or purchasing decisions in the last six months, according to new research from Exploding Topics. AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini have been absorbed into weekly shopping routines. The technology has rapidly become a staple of product research and price comparison, for everything from clothing to groceries. But at the same…

Programmatic SEO (pSEO) has been viewed with suspicion by the market. For many SEOs, the term is synonymous with low-quality pages, duplicate content, and the old tactic of “find and replace” city names in static templates. Google’s spam policies on scaled content abuse are clear: generating vast amounts of unoriginal content primarily to manipulate search rankings is a violation. Modern pSEO replaces mass page generation with an infrastructure that answers thousands of specific search intents with local nuance and semantic depth at a scale that isn’t possible manually. This blueprint shows how to evolve from syntax-based pSEO (swapping keywords) to semantics-…

I’ve built 10+ SEO agent skills in 34 days. Six worked on the first try. The other four taught me everything I’m about to show you about the folder structure most LinkedIn posts about AI SEO skills gloss over. What makes these agents reliable isn’t better prompts. It’s the architecture behind them. Here’s how to build an agent from scratch, test it, fix it, and ship it with confidence. Why most AI SEO skills fail Here’s what a typical “AI SEO prompt” looks like on LinkedIn: You are an SEO expert. Analyze the following website and provide a comprehensive audit with recommendations. That’s it. One prompt. Maybe some formatting instructions. The person post…

The conversation has shifted. We’re spending less time optimizing for clicks and more time trying to fix the AI ROI story. AI now sits at the center of discovery, shaping what gets seen, summarized, and cited. Here’s what’s working right now, what your peers are doing, and why SMX Advanced will feel different this year. The SparkToro wake-up call: Influence happens everywhere The foundation of any serious 2026 content strategy has to start with Rand Fishkin’s landmark March 2026 study, “Influence Happens Everywhere,” an analysis of the 5,000 most-visited sites on both mobile and desktop. The finding that rattled the industry: while Google still commands 73…