AI is fundamentally changing the way people search—and how brands show up. In How AI is Reshaping SEO: Challenges, Opportunities, and Brand Strategies for 2025, Search Engine Land and Fractl will share new findings from a fresh survey of hundreds of marketers, revealing how teams are integrating AI across SEO, content, PR, and social—and where […]

WordPress released a maintenance update that contains twenty changes to the core and fixes fifteen issues in the Gutenberg block editor. WordPress also announced that it is dropping security support for WordPress versions 4.1 to 4.6. Short-Cycle Maintenance Release This is a maintenance release that incrementally makes WordPress a smoother experience. Some of the fixes […]

Most ecommerce product pages weren’t built for how people shop today.  They were written for humans scanning specs – not for AI tools filtering, summarizing, and recommending products behind the scenes. But AI is now your new sales rep. And unless your product detail pages offer the right kind of context, they’ll be skipped entirely. […]

Brand mentions have always mattered, but they’ve become mission-critical for organic visibility in the AI era.  Brand building should now take priority over keyword-based strategies as your top priority in organic discovery. Why? Because brand mentions from trusted sources are the top factor for visibility in AI Overviews, per a recent Ahrefs study. There are […]

Spending on Google paid search ads rose 11% year over year in Q2, up from 9% in Q1, according to Tinuiti’s latest benchmark report. The acceleration comes amid weaker 2024 competition and a significant pullback from key competitors in Google Shopping. Click growth rose to 7%, while cost-per-click (CPC) growth eased to 3%. The standout […]

Google is experimenting with a new Gmail ad format that turns the Promotions tab into a mini shopping experience. What’s new. A visually rich ad unit appears in the Gmail Promotions tab. The ad showcases a featured product (image + brand) upfront. On click, it expands to show multiple product tiles side-by-side, including: product image, […]

Google has added a new metadata field to the Search Analytics API, making it easier for developers and SEO professionals to identify when they’re working with incomplete or still-processing data. The update introduces new transparency into the freshness of query results, an improvement for marketers who rely on up-to-date metrics to inform real-time decisions. What’s […]

Over the past few months, I’ve deeply analyzed how Google’s AI Overviews handle long-tail queries, dug into what makes brands visible in large language models (LLMs), and worked with brands trying to future-proof their SEO strategies. Today’s Memo is the first in a two-part series where I’m covering a tactical deep dive into one of […]

Google has made several changes to its local ranking documentation. The changes look to simplify the wording on the page, and it is unclear if these wording changes signify any changes to how Google local rankings work. What changed. If you look at the old document here and compare it to the new document here, you will see […]

This week’s Ask An SEO question is from someone who would like to know why their content is no longer “good” or “helpful.” The person is curious why they no longer rank for “their keywords” when other pages don’t have original photos or content that proves they have real experience. The person would like to […]