SEO news from around the world
Successful link and brand mention building is strongly about overcoming skepticism and building relationships with the people behind the websites that you want to acquire a link or brand mention…
Back in 2005 I intuited that there are wildly successful Internet enterprises that owed nothing to SEO. These successes intrigued me because they happened according to undocumented rules outside of…
BrightEdge’s latest research shows that Google’s AI Overviews are now appearing in ways that reflect what BrightEdge describes as “deliberate, aggressive choices” about where AI shows up and where it…
I like coming up with novel approaches to link building. One way to brainstorm an approach is to reverse a common method. I created a couple of approaches to link…
Google is rolling out AI shopping updates across Search and the Gemini app, introducing conversational shopping and agentic features that automate price tracking and local inventory checks. The updates begin…
AI search is rapidly changing the way people discover content and engage with brands. Logan Kilpatrick, Google’s lead product manager for AI products, suggested in an X (formerly Twitter) post…
TL;DR Search Console has some pretty severe limitations when it comes to storage, anonymized and incomplete data, and API limits. You can bypass a lot of these limitations and make…
This week, the paid media world focused less on new tools and more on what’s changing beneath the surface. Google expanded Performance Max into a new channel and offered long-awaited…
Learn how translated sites can boost SEO effectiveness. Discover the benefits of multilingual visibility in AI Overviews. The post Data: Translated Sites See 327% More Visibility in AI Overviews appeared…
OpenAI is experiencing a widespread outage affecting two systems, APIs and ChatGPT. The outage has been ongoing for at least a half an hour as of publication date. ChatGPT API…
This week’s news in SEO brings changes and questions about control. Google’s shopping AI moved from showing where to buy to completing purchases directly. Google added structured data for merchant…
Google has defended its enforcement of site reputation abuse policies after the European Commission announced an investigation into whether the company unfairly demotes news publishers in search results. The company…
At a recent conference, I was asked if llms.txt mattered. I’m personally not a fan, and we’ll get into why below. I listened to a friend who told me I…
Bianca challenged SEO’s obsession with traffic and introduced the “Heavy Hitters” framework for finding and protecting the URLs that convert, even when overall traffic drops. Key takeaways: Shift your reporting…
Expressly paying for links has been out for awhile. Quid Pro No is in. These are some things you can do when a website asks for money in exchange for…
Google improves suspension accuracy and appeal turnaround times, reducing false positives and helping legitimate advertisers resolve issues faster with clearer policy enforcement. The post Google Sharpens Suspension Accuracy and Speeds…
Google updated its review snippet documentation to clarify that each review or rating in structured data should point to one clear target, reducing ambiguity. Google updated its review snippet docs…
This week’s question comes from Evan, who asked: “How do I prevent my PPC budget from getting eaten by branded competitor terms?” It’s a good question, as few things frustrate…
A recent podcast by Ahrefs raised two issues about optimizing for AI search that can cause organizations to underperform and miss out on opportunities to improve sales. The conversation illustrates…
In a recent interview with Stanford University, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman predicted that AI security will become the defining problem of the next phase of AI development, saying that AI…
When running a Meta Ads campaign, creative should be at the center of your strategy. As targeting options have become more limited in the platform from the super-granular segments available…
If 2024 felt like a telenovela, 2025 was the spinoff nobody asked for. Many websites suffered declining clicks due to AI search features, and just as we were getting used…
OpenAI released GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking with updates to conversational style and reasoning capabilities. The updates begin rolling out today to paid users before expanding to free accounts. OpenAI…
YouTube’s Rene Ritchie says the recommendation system relies on audience behavior that only begins once a video is public.. Waiting 24–48 hours offers no benefit. YouTube’s recommendation system relies on…
Google is introducing two AI-powered tools built on Gemini: Ads Advisor in Google Ads and Analytics Advisor in Google Analytics. Availability starts in early December for English-language accounts globally. What’s…
Most SEO professionals obsess over content, links, and technical implementations. We track algorithm updates and audit on-page elements with precision. But there’s one factor that determines whether all that work…
Google Search now supports organization-level shipping policy markup, giving ecommerce websites a code-based way to surface delivery costs and transit times in Search and knowledge panels. When you add ShippingService…
TopRank Marketing and Ascend2 released a survey involving 797 B2B leaders. They discovered that 97% consider thought leadership as essential for achieving success throughout the entire marketing funnel. The report…
For this week’s Ask An SEO, the question asked was: “Do I need to rethink my content strategy for LLMs and how do I get started with that?” To answer,…
Marketing leaders are still budgeting to grow clicks in 2026, even though AI Overviews cut organic traffic in half and AI Mode kills it almost entirely. Image Credit: Kevin Indig…