SEO Tools and Resources

If you’re a lawyer, college administrator, or financial services provider, you’ve likely seen the frustrating “Eligible (Limited)” status in your Google Ads account. It can feel like you’re fighting Google with one hand tied behind your back when your remarketing lists, exact match keywords, and more don’t work as intended. While it might feel like Google Ads is out to get you when you operate in a so-called “sensitive interest category,” there are specific reasons for these rules. More importantly, there are specific ways to succeed despite them. This article will cover what the personalized advertising policies are, what they mean for your account, and five spec…

AI has changed how I work after nearly two decades in digital marketing. The shift has been meaningful, freeing up time, reducing the grinding parts of the job, and making some genuinely hard tasks faster. That doesn’t mean it does the work for you, transforms everything overnight, or saves you 40 hours a week. In real-world SEO, with real clients and real deadlines, it’s a tool that makes parts of the job easier, not something that replaces the work itself. Here are 20 ways I actually use it. Some are specific to SEO. Some are broader, but relevant to anyone working in the industry. All of them are practical, tested, and honest about their limitations. Conten…

Barry Adams recently published “Google Zero is a Lie” in his SEO for Google News newsletter, arguing that the narrative of Google traffic disappearing is false and dangerous. His data backs it up. Similarweb and Graphite data show only a 2.5% decline in Google traffic to top websites globally. Google still accounts for nearly 20% of all web visits. The widely cited Chartbeat figure showing a 33% decline? It’s skewed by a handful of large publishers hit by algorithm updates. Publishers who abandon SEO in the face of this panic are making a self-fulfilling prophecy, ceding traffic to competitors who keep optimizing. He’s right. And he’s looking at the wrong prob…

LinkedIn is one of the most powerful platforms for recruiting top-tier talent. It’s also one of the easiest places to waste budget if campaigns aren’t structured correctly. Many recruitment campaigns fail because they prioritize visibility over intent. More impressions don’t equal better hires. Broad targeting and generic messaging often lead to an influx of unqualified applicants, driving up cost-per-hire and slowing down hiring timelines. The most effective LinkedIn recruitment strategies focus on one thing: attracting and converting high-intent candidates while filtering out poor-fit applicants before they ever click. Let’s break down exactly how to do that. …

YouTube used its NewFront presentation to unveil a significant upgrade to its Creator Partnerships platform, adding Gemini-powered creator matching, stronger measurement tools, and new ways to run creator content as paid ads. Why we care. Influencer marketing has become a core part of many brands’ strategies, but finding the right creators at scale and proving ROI is a pain point. tackles influencer marketing’s two biggest friction points — finding the right creator and proving ROI. Gemini-powered matching cuts through the noise of three million creators, while the ability to run creator content as paid Shorts and in-stream ads makes performance measurable like a…

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,…

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…

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…

Gary Illyes from Google shared some more details on Googlebot, Google’s crawling ecosystem, fetching and how it processes bytes. The article is named Inside Googlebot: demystifying crawling, fetching, and the bytes we process. Googlebot. Google has many more than one singular crawler, it has many crawlers for many purposes. So referencing Googlebot as a singular crawler, might not be super accurate anymore. Google documented many of its crawlers and user agents over here. Limits. Recently, Google spoke about its crawling limits. Now, Gary Illyes dug into it more. He said: Googlebot currently fetches up to 2MB for any individual URL (excluding PDFs). …

SEO hiring is shifting toward senior, strategy-led roles as AI reshapes search and expands the scope of the job. A new Semrush analysis of 3,900 listings shows companies now prioritize leadership, experimentation, and cross-channel visibility over pure technical execution. Why we care. SEO hiring, career paths, and required skills are changing. Entry roles focus on execution, while most demand sits at the leadership level — owning strategy across search, AI assistants, and paid channels, with clear revenue impact. What changed. Senior roles dominated, accounting for 59% of listings. Mid-level roles, such as specialists (15%) and managers (10%), trailed far behind.…

Technical SEO extends beyond indexing to how content is discovered and used, especially as AI systems generate answers instead of listing pages. For generative engine optimization (GEO), the underlying tools and frameworks remain largely the same, but how you implement them determines whether your content gets surfaced — or overlooked. That means focusing on how AI agents access your site, how content is structured for extraction, and how reliably it can be interpreted and reused in generated responses. Agentic access control: Managing the bot frontier From a technical standpoint, robots.txt is a tool you already use in your SEO arsenal. You need to add the…

In 1998, submitting a website to search engines was manual, methodical, and genuinely tedious. I remember 17 of them: AltaVista, Yahoo Directory, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, HotBot, Northern Light, Ask Jeeves, DMOZ, Snap, LookSmart, GoTo.com, AllTheWeb, Inktomi, iWon, and About.com. Each had its own form, process, and wait time, and its own quiet judgment about whether your URL was worth including. We submitted manually, 18,000 pages in all. Yawn. Google was barely a year old when we were doing this. But they were already building the thing that would make submission irrelevant. PageRank meant Google followed links, and a site that other sites linke…

OpenAI now allows users of ChatGPT to share their device location so that ChatGPT can know more precisely where the user is and serve better answers and results based on that location. The feature is called location sharing, OpenAI wrote, “Sharing your device location is completely optional and off until you choose to enable it. You can update device location sharing in Settings > Data Controls at any time.” What it does. If ChatGPT knows your location, it can return better local results. OpenAI wrote: “Precise location means ChatGPT can use your device’s specific location, such as an exact address, to provide more tailored results.” “For example, if y…

Google Business Profile (GBP) may be getting shoved down the SERPs by ads and AI Overviews more than ever, but it’s still a top source of inbound leads for local businesses — and one of the fastest ways to improve rankings with simple fixes. Here’s a five-step audit to find and fix the gaps most businesses miss. 1. Evaluate Google review velocity and recency It’s a common misconception that the business with the most Google reviews wins in Google Maps ranking. While a high review count provides social proof, Google’s algorithm has more of a “what have you done for me lately?” attitude. The number of reviews you get a month, and how recent your last review w…

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…

You’ve worked hard to build your product catalog. The last thing you want is AI tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini describing your products inaccurately to potential customers. AI tools don’t browse your whole store the way a search engine does. They grab what they can find, quickly, and fill in the gaps. For a store with a large catalog, that means incomplete answers, outdated information, or worse, sending shoppers to a competitor. The new llms.txt feature, available in Yoast SEO for Shopify bridges that gap. What does it actually do? It creates a file that tells AI tools which parts of your store matter most: your top products, your collections, you…

Google removed a Search Engine Land article (Report: Clickout Media turned news sites into AI gambling hubs, published March 26) from its search results after a copyright complaint (that appears, to us, to be entirely false). Meanwhile, a similar DMCA filing led to the takedown of the original Press Gazette investigation. What happened. A DMCA notice filed March 27 claimed Search Engine Land copied content “word for word” and used proprietary images. The complaint led Google to begin removing the article from search results globally. The notice identifies the complainant as “US Webspam,” with no clear public attribution. The context. The removed article re…

Microsoft Advertising now allows e-commerce merchants to edit their Merchant Center store name and domain directly within the platform — no support ticket required. Why we care. Store details like names and URLs change as businesses rebrand or restructure. Previously, updating these required manual intervention. Self-serve control reduces friction and keeps campaigns running more smoothly during transitions. How it works — the details: Store name changes go through editorial review before going live. During review, ads keep running under the existing approved name — so there’s no interruption to campaigns. Domain/URL changes require merchants to verify…

Reddit today opened its Pro publishing tools to all publishers, removing the waitlist and offering free access in a public beta to expand distribution and engagement. Why we care. Reddit Pro gives you a centralized tool to track where your content spreads, streamline posting, and find the right communities. It transforms Reddit from a manual posting exercise into a structured distribution channel. The details. You can now sign up for Reddit Pro, verify your domain (typically within three business days), and access the Links tab. With Reddit Pro, you can: Track where your content is shared across Reddit. Auto-import articles via RSS for quick posting. Ge…

A bug in Google Ads Editor is causing structured snippet extensions copied between accounts to remain unintentionally linked. When advertisers change the language in one account, it can automatically update the same extension in another. Why we care. This bug creates hidden inconsistencies for advertisers managing multi-market campaigns, especially when different languages are required across accounts. What advertisers are seeing. The issue surfaced while managing Czech and Slovak e-commerce accounts by digital marketer Marcin Wsół. Changing the snippet language in one account triggered the same change in the other. The extensions appear separate but behave a…

Google says a new compression algorithm, called TurboQuant, can compress and search massive AI data sets with near-zero indexing time, potentially removing one of the biggest speed limits in modern search systems. What it is. TurboQuant is a way to shrink and organize the data that powers AI and search without losing accuracy. It reduces memory use while keeping results precise and cuts the time to build searchable AI indexes to “virtually zero,” according to the research paper. How it works. Modern search converts content into vectors (lists of numbers that represent meaning). Similar ideas sit close together in this numeric space, and search finds the closest ma…

In long sales cycles, a lot of what happens after lead submission involves people. When you optimize campaigns to final sales, you’re teaching the ad platform to respond to how well the sales team performed that month rather than lead quality, and that’s a problem no amount of campaign changes will fix. The common advice is to “optimize the full funnel” (i.e., track media spend to revenue, optimize campaigns to sales, etc.). But beyond lead capture, most of what drives sales has little to do with your paid media. It’s about who’s on the sales team, how busy they are, and dozens of other factors you can’t influence through targeting or creative. When your sales tea…

AI search is changing how visibility works. Users are getting direct answers instead of clicking links, which means fewer chances to drive traffic. In this shift, AI citations are becoming the new gatekeepers, deciding which sources get featured in answers. Over the past year, search has moved from ranking pages to selecting sources, pushing us from traditional SEO toward AI-driven visibility. In this article, we’ll explain what AI citations are, how they work, and how you can earn them. Table of contents What are AI citations? How AI citations impact brand credibility How AI citations work: a complete breakdown Strategies to get cited by AI models Tracking AI b…

The OpenAI GPT Store launched in January 2024 with more than 3 million custom GPTs. Ask any team how many they still use, and the answer is usually zero or one. Most business GPTs fail because they’re built like novelties rather than tools. They’re too broad, under-tested, and launched without a strategy, so they never become part of a team’s workflow. I’ve built and audited 12+ custom GPTs across marketing, SEO, and sales teams. The pattern is consistent: a small number get used daily, while most collect dust. Here’s how to build GPTs that do — from validating the right use case to structuring, testing, and launching in a way that drives real adoption. …

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…