SEO Tools and Resources

We know AI responses are probabilistic – if you ask an AI the same question 10 times, you’ll get 10 different responses. But how different are the responses? That’s the question Rand Fishkin explored in some interesting research. And it has big implications for how we should think about tracking AI visibility for brands. In his research, he tested prompts asking for recommendations in all sorts of products and services, including everything from chef’s knives to cancer care hospitals and Volvo dealerships in Los Angeles. Basically, he found that: AIs rarely recommend the same list of brands in the same order twice. For a given topic (e.g., runn…

Eighty million people use Reddit search every week, Reddit said on its Q4 2025 earnings call last week. The increase followed a major change: Reddit merged its core search with its AI-powered Reddit Answers and began positioning the platform as a place where users can start — and finish — their searches. Executives framed the move as a response to changing behavior. People are increasingly researching products and making decisions by asking questions within communities rather than relying solely on traditional search engines. Reddit is betting it can keep more of that intent on-platform, rather than acting mainly as a source of links for elsewhere. Why we care…

OpenAI is rolling out its first live test of ads in ChatGPT, placing sponsored messages directly inside the app for some users. The details. According to CNBC, the ads will appear in a clearly labeled section beneath the chat interface rather than inside responses. The format is designed to keep ads visually separate from ChatGPT’s answers. OpenAI will show ads to logged-in users on the free tier and its lower-cost Go subscription. The company says advertisers won’t see users’ conversations and won’t influence ChatGPT’s responses, though ads will be optimized based on what OpenAI considers helpful to the user. What else is coming. In an internal memo cited by …

Google’s AI Mode isn’t more likely to cite content that appears “above the fold,” according to a study from SALT.agency, a technical SEO and content agency. After analyzing more than 2,000 URLs cited in AI Mode responses, researchers found no correlation between how high text appears on a page and whether Google’s AI selects it for citation. Pixel depth doesn’t matter. AI Mode cited text from across entire pages, including content buried thousands of pixels down. Citation depth showed no meaningful relationship to visibility. Average depth varied by vertical, from about 2,400 pixels in travel to 4,600 pixels in SaaS, with many citations far below the tr…

A newly discovered settings panel offers an first detailed look at how ads may work inside ChatGPT — including how personalization and privacy controls are designed. Driving the news. Entrepreneur Juozas Kaziukėnas discovered a way to trigger ChatGPT’s upcoming ad settings interface. The panel repeatedly emphasizes that advertisers won’t see users’ chats, history, memories, personal details, or IP addresses. What the settings reveal: The interface outlines a structured ad system with dedicated controls: A History tab logs ads users have viewed inside ChatGPT. An Interests tab stores inferred preferences based on ad interactions and feedback. Each…

Generative engine optimization (GEO) represents a shift from optimizing for keyword-based ranking systems to optimizing for how generative search engines interpret and assemble information. While the inner workings of generative AI are famously complex, patents and research papers filed by major tech companies such as Google and Microsoft provide concrete insight into the technical mechanisms underlying generative search. By analyzing these primary sources, we can move beyond speculation and into strategic action. This article analyzes the most insightful patents to provide actionable lessons for three core pillars of GEO: query fan-out, large language model (LLM…

If you’re relying on GA4 alone to measure the impact of AI SEO, you’re navigating with a broken compass. Don’t misunderstand me. It’s a reasonable launch pad. But to understand how audiences discover, evaluate, and ultimately choose brands, measurement must move beyond the bounds of Google’s tooling. SEO is a journey, not a destination. If you optimize only for attributable visits, large parts of that journey disappear from view. Sessions are an outcome. They can’t contextualize consideration sets increasingly shaped by algorithms and AI well before a visit ever happens. Don’t lose potential customers in the Bermuda Triangle of traditional SEO measurement…

We’ve all been there. A client wants to scale their Google Ads account from €10,000 per month to €100,000. So, you do what any good PPC manager would do: Refine your bidding strategy. Test new ad copy variations. Expand your keyword portfolio. Optimize landing pages. Improve Quality Scores. Launch Performance Max campaigns. Three months later, you’ve increased ad spend by 15%. The client is… fine with it. But you know you should be doing better. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Most pay-per-click (PPC) optimization work is sophisticated procrastination. What the theory of constraints teaches us about PPC The theory of constraints, develop…

On episode 340 of PPC Live The Podcast, I speak to Amanda Farley, CMO of Aimclear and a multi-award-winning marketing leader, brings a mix of honesty and expertise to the PPC Live conversation. A self-described T-shaped marketer, she combines deep PPC knowledge with broad experience across social, programmatic, PR, and integrated strategy. Her journey — from owning an gallery and tattoo studio to leading award-winning global campaigns — reflects a career built on curiosity, resilience, and continuous learning. Overcoming limiting beliefs and embracing creativity Amanda once ran an gallery and tattoo parlor while believing she wasn’t an artist herself. Surrounded b…

Google is rolling out a beta feature that lets advertisers run structured A/B tests on creative assets within a single Performance Max asset group. Advertisers can split traffic between two asset sets and measure performance in a controlled experiment. Why we care. Creative testing inside Performance Max has mostly relied on guesswork. Google’s new native A/B asset experiments bring controlled testing directly into PMax — without spinning up separate campaigns. How it works. Advertisers choose one Performance Max campaign and asset group, then define a control asset set (existing creatives) and a treatment set (new alternatives). Shared assets can run across both …

Google Ads rolled out a data source diagnostics feature inside Data Manager that helps advertisers monitor the health of their data connections. The tool flags issues tied to offline conversions, CRM imports, and tagging mismatches. How it works. A centralized dashboard assigns clear connection status labels — Excellent, Good, Needs attention, or Urgent — and surfaces actionable alerts. Advertisers can see problems like refused credentials, formatting errors, and failed imports alongside a run history showing recent sync attempts and error counts. Why we care. When conversion data breaks, campaign optimization breaks with it. Even small data connection failure…

Performance Max has come a long way since its rocky launch. Many advertisers once dismissed it as a half-baked product, but Google has spent the past 18 months fixing real issues around transparency and control. If you wrote Performance Max off before, it’s time to take another look. Mike Ryan, head of ecommerce insights at Smarter Ecommerce, explained why at the latest SMX Next. Taking a fresh look at Performance Max Performance Max traces its roots to Smart Shopping campaigns, which Google rolled out with red carpet fanfare at Google Marketing Live in 2019. Even then, industry experts warned that transparency and control would become serious issues. The…

Traditional ranking performance no longer guarantees that content can be surfaced or reused by AI systems. A page can rank well, satisfy search intent, and follow established SEO best practices, yet still fail to appear in AI-generated answers or citations. In most cases, the issue isn’t content quality. It’s that the information can’t reliably be extracted once it’s parsed, segmented, and embedded by AI retrieval systems. This is an increasingly common challenge in AI search. Search engines evaluate pages as complete documents and can compensate for structural ambiguity through link context, historical performance, and other ranking signals. AI systems don’…

PR measurement often breaks down in practice. Limited budgets, no dedicated analytics staff, siloed teams, and competing priorities make it difficult to connect media outreach to real outcomes. That’s where collaboration with SEO, PPC, and digital marketing teams becomes essential. Working together, these teams can help PR do three things that are hard to accomplish alone: Show the connection between media outreach and customer action. Incorporate SEO – and now generative engine optimization (GEO) – into measurement programs. Select tools that match the metrics that actually matter. This article lays out a practical way to do exactly that, witho…

There’s a dangerous misconception in B2B marketing that video is just a “brand awareness” play. We tend to bucket video into two extremes: The “viral” top-of-funnel asset that gets views but no leads. The dry bottom-of-funnel product demo that gets leads but no views. This binary thinking is breaking your pipeline. In my role at LinkedIn, I have access to a unique view of the B2B buying ecosystem. What the data shows is that the most successful companies don’t treat video as a tactic for one stage of the funnel. They treat it as a multiplier. When you integrate video strategy across the entire buying journey – connecting brand to demand – effectivene…

Representatives from both the Google Search and Bing Search teams are recommending against creating separate markdown (.md) pages for LLM purposes. The purpose is to serve one piece of content to the LLM and another piece of content to your users, which technically may be considered a form of cloaking and against Google’s policies. The question. Lily Ray asked on Bluesky: “Not sure if you can answer, but starting to hear a lot about creating separate markdown / JSON pages for LLMs and serving those URLs to bots.” Google’s response. John Mueller from Google responded saying: “I’m not aware of anything in that regard. In my POV, LLMs have trained on – rea…

For many local businesses, performance looks healthier than it is. Rank trackers still show top-three positions. Visibility reports appear steady. Yet calls and website visits from Google Business Profiles are falling — sometimes fast. This gap is becoming a defining feature of local search today. Rankings are holding. Visibility and performance aren’t. The alligator has arrived in local SEO. The visibility crisis behind stable rankings Across multiple U.S. industries, traditional local 3-packs are being replaced — or at least supplemented — by AI-powered local packs. These layouts behave differently from the map results we’ve optimized in the past.…

Google has released the February 2026 Discover core update, this is a core update specific to how Google surfaces content within Google Discover. Google wrote, “This is a broad update to our systems that surface articles in Discover.” This is first rolling out to English language users in the US, and will expand it to all countries and languages in the months ahead, Google said. What is expected. Google said the Discover update will improve the Google Discover “experience in a few key ways,” including: Showing users more locally relevant content from websites based in their country Reducing sensational content and clickbait in Discover Showing more i…

Most PPC teams still build campaigns the same way: pull a keyword list, set match types, and organize ad groups around search terms. It’s muscle memory. But Google’s auction no longer works that way. Search now behaves more like a conversation than a lookup. In AI Mode, users ask follow-up questions and refine what they’re trying to solve. AI Overviews reason through an answer first, then determine which ads support that answer. In Google Ads, the auction isn’t triggered by a keyword anymore – it’s triggered by inferred intent. If you’re still structuring campaigns around exact and phrase match, you’re planning for a system that no longer exists. The new f…

Google Search is entering an “expansionary moment” driven by longer queries, more follow-up questions, and growing use of voice and images. That’s according to Alphabet’s executives who spoke on last night’s Q4 earnings call. In other words: Google Search is evolving into AI-driven experiences where conversations increasingly happen inside Google’s own interfaces. Why we care. AI in Google Search is no longer an experiment. It is a structural change that is altering user behavior and is reshaping discovery, visibility, and traffic across the web. By the numbers. Alphabet’s Q4 advertising revenue totaled $82.284 billion, up 13.5% from $72.461 billion 2024: …

AI is no longer an experimental layer in search. It’s actively mediating how customers discover, evaluate, and choose local businesses, increasingly without a traditional search interaction. The real risk is data stagnation. As AI systems act on local data for users, brands that fail to adapt risk declining visibility, data inconsistencies, and loss of control over how locations are represented across AI surfaces. Learn how AI is changing local search and what you can do to stay visible in this new landscape. How AI search is different from traditional search We are experiencing a platform shift where machine inference, not database retrieval, drives d…

Right now, it’s hard to find a marketing conversation that doesn’t include two letters: AI. SEOs, strategists, and marketing leaders everywhere are asking the same question in different ways: How do we use AI to cut manpower, streamline work, move faster, and boost efficiency? Much of that thinking makes sense. If you run a business, you can’t ignore a tool that turns hours of grunt work into minutes. You’d be foolish to try. But we’re spending too much time asking, “Can AI do this?” and not enough time asking, “Should AI do this?” Once the initial excitement fades, some uncomfortable questions show up. If every title tag, meta description, land…

As AI-driven bidding and automation transform paid media, first-party data has become the most powerful lever advertisers control. In this conversation with Search Engine Land, Julie Warneke, founder and CEO of Found Search Marketing, explained why first-party data now underpins profitable advertising — no matter how Google’s position on third-party cookies evolves. What first-party data really is — and isn’t First-party data is customer information that an advertiser owns directly, usually housed in a CRM. It includes: Lead details. Purchase history. Revenue. Customer value collected through websites, forms, or physical locations. It doesn’…

Google Ads has quietly rolled out multi-party approval, a security feature that requires a second administrator to approve certain high-risk account actions. These include adding or removing users and changing user roles. Why we care. As ad accounts grow larger — and more valuable — access control has become a bigger risk. A single unauthorized, malicious or accidental account change can disrupt campaigns, access, and billing in minutes. Multi-party approval reduces that risk by requiring a second admin sign-off on high-impact actions, adding protection without changing day-to-day campaign management. For agencies and large teams especially, it helps prevent cost…

In 2015, PPC was a game of direct control. You told Google exactly which keywords to target, set manual bids at the keyword level, and capped spend with a daily budget. If you were good with spreadsheets and understood match types, you could build and manage 30,000-keyword accounts all day long. Those days are gone. In 2026, platform automation is no longer a helpful assistant. It’s the primary driver of performance. Fighting that reality is a losing battle. Automation has leveled the playing field and, in many cases, given PPC marketers back their time. But staying effective now requires a different skill set: understanding how automated systems learn and h…