Google has introduced a Campaign Data Import Validation Report, giving advertisers a new way to check the quality of imported campaign data before it impacts reporting.
The report is designed to help identify missing or incomplete data from non-Google advertising platforms.
What’s happening. The new validation report reviews both non-Google campaign data and previously imported campaign data, highlighting campaigns that may be missing key performance metrics.
Specifically, it helps advertisers identify imports that lack essential reporting fields such as cost, clicks and impressions, making it easier to spot gaps before relying on the data for analysis.
Why we care. Missing or incomplete data can lead to inaccurate reporting, making it harder to compare channels or evaluate marketing performance. The new validation report provides an additional layer of quality control, helping you ensure imported data is complete and reliable.
Introduced in 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was designed to solve a specific problem: protecting creators from digital piracy while granting online platforms a “safe harbor” from liability.
Under Section 512, search engines and host providers avoid expensive lawsuits as long as they act swiftly to remove content when a copyright holder flags an infringement.
That “act swiftly” requirement creates an unintended vulnerability. Because major platforms rely on automated processing to handle millions of removal requests every month, bad actors can trigger automatic deindexing without human review.
What was designed as a shield for intellectual property is now a weapon for corporate censorship, reputation management, and competitive sabotage.
A real-world example of DMCA abuse
In March, a clear demonstration of DMCA abuse played out in full public view. Investigative reporters at Press Gazette published a story examining how a digital media firm, Clickout Media, allegedly acquired established news domains to deploy AI-generated gambling content, a tactic known in SEO circles as site reputation abuse.
Within 48 hours, both articles vanished from Google search results worldwide.
An entity identifying itself as “US Webspam” filed a copyright complaint alleging that Search Engine Land had copied its material word-for-word, including proprietary images.
The claim was fraudulent:
Zero image match: The Search Engine Land article contained no images whatsoever.
No direct outreach: The filing claimed “multiple good-faith efforts” had been made to resolve the dispute, yet no communication was ever sent to the editorial team.
Fabricated source: The complainant pointed to irrelevant third-party domains as the “original source” of the reporting.
Despite these clear discrepancies, Google’s automated systems processed the request and deindexed the article.
It took public pushback from search industry analysts, widespread media attention, and a formal counter-notice before Google reinstated both Search Engine Land and Press Gazette in the search index several days later.
If an established publication with high domain authority can have its coverage muted overnight, individual creators, niche blogs, and small businesses face an even tougher challenge.
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The mechanics of bad-faith DMCA takedowns
Understanding why weaponized takedowns succeed requires looking at the incentives of online platforms.
Under U.S. copyright law, platforms like Google, Cloudflare, and major web hosts remain protected from copyright liability only if they act “expeditiously to remove, or disable access to” material claimed to be infringing.
Because taking down a page carries virtually zero legal risk for the platform, while ignoring a notice risks a lawsuit, platforms prioritize speed over verification.
Key structural flaw: Section 512 places the burden of proof on the accused rather than the claimant. The platform shoots first and asks questions later.
Malicious actors exploit this asymmetry using three primary techniques:
Scraper-and-backdate schemes: A bad actor scrapes your original article, pastes it onto a disposable site, alters the metadata or timestamp to make it appear published earlier, and files a DMCA claim alleging you stole their work.
Fabricated entities: Attackers submit takedown claims under fake organization names, such as “US Webspam,” or impersonate third-party blogs to hide their true identity.
Reputation suppression: Individuals or brands facing negative press file dubious claims against investigative pieces, product reviews, or customer complaints to suppress damaging search results during high-impact windows.
5 steps to take when your content is unfairly DMCA’d
Discovering that your URL has been de-indexed or pulled down by your host can be alarming. Following a structured procedure helps ensure your content is restored efficiently.
1. Identify and inspect the notice
When Google removes a URL due to a DMCA claim, you’ll receive a notification in Google Search Console under Security & Manual Actions, along with an email detailing the notice.
Locate the exact complaint in the Lumen Database (lumendatabase.org), a public repository that archives legal requests to remove web content. Examine the filing carefully:
Who is listed as the copyright owner?
What specific URL do they claim is the original source?
What specific text or media is alleged to be copied?
2. Gather incontrovertible proof of prior ownership
Before filing your response, assemble evidence establishing that your content predates the claimant’s alleged original version:
CMS timestamp logs: Export full publish logs from WordPress, Ghost, or your custom database showing creation dates and edit histories.
Wayback Machine archives: Pull historical snapshots from the Internet Archive showing your page live before the claimant’s alleged publication date.
RSS feed records: Retrieve original RSS distribution records, which index publication times down to the second.
Git commit history: If your site uses static site generators or version control, export commit hashes showing when the file was created.
To force the platform to restore your content, you must file a formal DMCA counter-notification. Under statutory guidelines, a counter-notice must include:
Identification of the material that was removed and its original location.
A statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification.
Your full name, physical address, phone number, and email address.
Consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for your judicial district (or the district where your host is located if outside the U.S.).
Your physical or electronic signature.
4. Understand the statutory waiting period
Once the platform receives your valid counter-notice, the law requires it to forward it to the original claimant. The claimant then has 10 to 14 business days to submit proof that they’ve filed a formal lawsuit seeking a court order to restrain you from publishing the content.
If the claimant fails to produce evidence of a court filing within that 10- to 14-day window, the platform is legally obligated to restore your content to its index or server.
5. Escalate publicly and pursue Section 512(f) remedies
In high-stakes situations, such as time-sensitive reporting or ecommerce launch campaigns, waiting two full weeks can cause serious financial damage.
If your case involves an obvious fraudulent claim (such as alleging image theft on an all-text page), publicize the details on social platforms like X and LinkedIn while tagging the official search representative handles. Search engine teams do occasionally fast-track obvious manual reviews when blatant system gaming is exposed publicly.
Section 512(f) of the DMCA explicitly holds that any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material is infringing shall be liable for damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees incurred by the alleged infringer.
While litigation takes time, sending a formal litigation hold letter to a bad actor who used a real legal identity can prompt a swift withdrawal of their claim.
Proactive steps to safeguard your intellectual property
While you can’t stop an anonymous actor from filing a fraudulent notice, proactive site hygiene makes resolving disputes far simpler:
Auto-archive upon publication: Set up an automated webhook or API connection to archive new articles to the Internet Archive immediately upon publishing.
Maintain clear byline and copyright notices: Ensure every article includes schema structured data (NewsArticle or Article schema) complete with datePublished, dateModified, and author metadata.
Monitor Search Console alerts: Ensure Google Search Console notification emails route to a primary inbox that gets checked daily. Missing a notice delays your counter-filing window.
Keep original source files: Store raw video files, unedited photography, audio recordings, and rough draft revisions safely off-site to demonstrate your creation process.
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Defending your content against fraudulent takedowns
The Search Engine Land incident highlights a structural issue in modern web governance: automated copyright tools built to shield giant platforms can easily be turned against legitimate creators.
Until policy revisions require stronger identity verification or impose stiffer penalties for false claims, bad actors will continue to misuse takedown requests to silence competitors and critics. By understanding your rights, documenting your publishing pipeline, and acting quickly with formal counter-notifications, you can defend your work and restore your digital presence.
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Franchise SEO is the practice of optimizing your online presence so each franchise location ranks higher in search engine results and AI Overviews.
SEO for franchises requires balancing brand consistency across locations with the need for each branch to stand out independently in its local market.
Core tactics include targeting local keywords, creating unique location pages, setting up a Google Business Profile for every branch, and maintaining accurate name, address, phone number (NAP) citations.
AI Overviews now influence a majority of local searches, and thin or duplicate location pages tend to get filtered out. That means each page needs unique content and visible experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) signals.
SEO is a long-term play. Pair it with a solid technical audit and a franchise pay-per-click (PPC) strategy to cover ground that organic search alone can’t quickly reach.
Operating a franchise is a fantastic way to start a business.
Not only are people already aware of your brand, but you get the support and backing of a well-established organization and a pre-existing customer base ready to buy.
However, consistent effort is essential for long-term success.
Franchise SEO is essential for ranking in search engine results and AI Overviews, increasing your reach to new customers. About 60 percent of searches result in zero clicks due to the growing appearance of AI Overviews. Franchisees need to understand both traditional and modern SEO tactics to truly expand their audience.
In this article, I’ll explain SEO for franchise businesses, how it differs from standard SEO, and up-to-date strategies to help your franchise stand out.
What Is Franchise SEO?
Franchise search engine optimization (SEO) is when you optimize your online presence to make your franchise business stand out in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, as well as in AI search tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Perplexity.
Key franchise SEO tips include:
Optimizing your website for local keywords
Creating website content to appeal to customers and localizing the content when relevant
Getting backlinks from relevant local websites
Encouraging customers to submit reviews of your business
Ensuring your website loads quickly and is mobile responsive (52.3 percent of global website traffic comes from mobile devices)
With franchises, there’s a lot of competition. You’re not only up against other brands but potentially competing branches in the same franchise.
Given that almost three-quarters of people use Google to find local business information, the higher you can rank in the search engine results, the better.
Whether you run one franchise or 20, implementing effective SEO for your franchise website means more organic traffic. That, in turn, leads to more store visits, sales, and profits.
Franchise SEO vs. Regular SEO: What’s the Difference?
Standard SEO focuses on keywords and content for a single website or a company as a whole.
Local SEO for franchises is a specialized form of SEO that focuses on optimizing each franchise location. Local SEO is typically a large part of this strategy. That includes making sure that each site contains the correct information, such as address and contact details, and is formatted correctly.
SEO for franchise websites can be tricky, as you need to optimize each location independently.
If you manage multiple franchise locations, you also need to consider your website’s structure and how all your location pages work together. After all, you don’t want to promote one location at the expense of another.
With franchise SEO, people tend to search for more niche, location-specific keywords. You need to consider their search intent to optimize your website properly.
Challenges With Franchise SEO
While effective franchise SEO is rewarding, it presents unique challenges.
Here’s what to watch for:
The risk of duplicate content. Franchise locations often use similar content across their websites, which can lead to duplicate content issues in the search results. It’s essential to keep duplicate content to a minimum.
Building local content. With SEO for your franchise, you need to balance standard SEO with local SEO. You have to make each location stand out for its own area while keeping every site within brand guidelines.
Brand inconsistency. Franchises need to have a cohesive look and feel. While it’s important for your stores to rank as high as possible, they also need to share a consistent brand identity.
AI Overview visibility. With AI Overviews appearing for 57 percent of local searches. To be cited in these results, each location needs unique, credible content rather than boilerplate copied across sites.
Use These SEO Strategies for Your Franchise
Now that we understand the differences between standard and franchise SEO, let’s look deeper into some strategies to help your franchise succeed.
1. Identify the Most Important Keywords Related to Your Business
The first step is to identify and research the keywords most relevant to your franchise.
Consider:
Your target audience. What keywords are they most likely to use?
Your location. You want to target local keywords and terms.
Your competitors. What keywords do they rank for?
Search intent. Are customers looking for information, or are they ready to buy?
Plenty of tools can help you find and research the right keywords for your franchise.
Ubersuggest, for instance, shows you what’s already working for others in your market, so you can borrow those ideas and refine them.
In the example below, the term “best mattresses near me” has an SEO difficulty of 55. This tells you that ranking highly is doable, but landing the top spot will take some work.
However, “best mattress stores near me” has an SEO difficulty of 75, meaning there’s much more competition and you’ll have a harder time clinching the top spot.
While it’s designed for use with Google Ads, it can suggest a wealth of relevant keywords based on a seed phrase or your website URL.
2. Localize Your Keywords
Localizing your keywords makes sure you target the right customers in the right areas.
If you have multiple locations, it is especially important to localize your keywords to reach customers in each area.
Let’s say you run a car maintenance franchise in Broward County, Florida. Strong localized keywords might include:
“Car repairs in Fort Lauderdale”
“Car servicing in Pembroke Pines”
“Car mechanic in Hollywood”
Hyperlocal SEO takes it a step further, targeting specific geographic areas, like neighborhoods or streets, to maximize visibility. For example: “Car mechanic on Ocean Drive.”
3. Localize Your Website
Localizing your website is a great way to optimize for local SEO and promote your individual franchise locations.
Create dedicated pages for each franchise location with a clear address, phone number, and other relevant information. You’ll also need to include unique content on each location page, as pages with thin content don’t compete in AI Overviews or Local Packs.
Creating a proper local page for each location helps you rank for local keywords and increases your NAP (name, address, phone number) citations, which I’ll discuss later.
It also helps to include a map of the area with each franchise’s location marked. This makes your website more search-engine-friendly and helps customers find the nearest location.
Franchises often use multiple domains. The main corporate domain serves as the central hub for the franchise brand, providing high-level information, while individual franchise locations use separate domains to target local audiences more effectively. In this case, linking all the domains together will help search engines understand that they are related.
4. Optimize Your Individual Businesses on Google Business Profile and Other Directories
One of the best ways to enhance your franchise’s search engine presence is to set up Google Business Profiles (GBPs) for each location.
A GBP provides additional context about your franchise locations, including your address, phone number, hours, and products or services you provide.
Having a Google Business Profile also increases the chance of your franchise appearing in the Local Pack map at the top of the search results.
Additionally, regularly publishing posts like offers, events, and updates, and actively managing the Q&A section, signals to Google that the profile is active and maintained. That can improve AI Overview and Local Pack eligibility.
Try to complete as many fields as possible and keep everything current, so searchers always get the most accurate information about your business.
Beyond Google, signing up for other directories can widen your franchise’s visibility, build additional NAP citations, and generate backlinks to your website. Just be sure to choose directories that are relevant and authoritative. Low-quality, spammy ones can hurt your online presence.
Sites like Yelp, Foursquare, and Yellow Pages (YP) are good starting points. I’d also suggest checking with your local chamber of commerce, which can often point you to directories worth listing on.
5. Make Sure Your Brand Is Consistent
McDonald’s is one of the largest franchised businesses in the world. It has a massive marketing “bible” that helps enforce brand consistency, telling franchisees everything from what colors to use to which words to avoid.
As a result, McDonald’s has remarkable brand uniformity, and customers can expect the same experience wherever they are in the world.
You don’t need a guide as extensive as McDonald’s, but you do need a cohesive look and brand voice. This helps customers trust you, and it helps search engines and AI systems recognize you as a legitimate business.
That means keeping your brand messaging, logo, visuals, and fonts consistent across all platforms, including your website, Google Business Profile, and social media accounts.
The easiest way to manage this is with a style guide and regular audits to keep all your digital marketing assets aligned.
6. Audit Your Technical SEO
Your franchise’s content can’t rank if search engines can’t properly access and understand your site. That’s where technical SEO comes in.
Here’s where to focus:
Mobile-friendliness: Google indexes mobile-first, so your franchise site needs to look and function well on smaller screens.
Page speed: Slow-loading pages frustrate users and can hurt rankings. Use PageSpeed Insights to help pinpoint the culprits, whether that’s oversized images or a slow server response.
Crawlability: Make sure search engines can easily navigate your site by maintaining a clean sitemap, fixing broken links, and reviewing your robots.txt file.
Once you’ve reviewed those areas, run a site crawl using a tool like Screaming Frog or Semrush to uncover hidden issues with duplicate content or missing meta tags.
For larger franchise operations managing hundreds of locations, our guide to enterprise SEO digs deeper into scaling these technical fixes.
7. Target and Remove Duplicate Content
When you have a website with multiple location pages that are very similar, you risk confusing the search engines.
If a search engine sees several pages with duplicate content, it has to decide which one to rank. It uses several factors to work this out, but there is a chance it gets the answer wrong.
Fortunately, you can see which pages are being indexed and which aren’t by using Google Search Console’s “Crawled – currently not indexed” filter. From there, you can take steps to make sure search engines aren’t showing the wrong location page to the wrong person.
Let’s say you operate a chain of restaurants and have the same menu at each. Rather than having an identical menu on each location page, use a stand-alone menu page and link to it instead.
You can also steer crawlbots toward what you want them to see and guide them away from pages you don’t. Implementing a “rel=canonical” tag makes sure you can consolidate rankings to the intended URL.
8. Have a Local Link-Building Strategy
Link building is the practice of getting other websites to link back to your site.
When you get links from relevant, high-quality sites, it shows search engines that your website is trustworthy and reliable, leading to a boost in search results.
Link building is one of the trickiest aspects of franchise SEO because the results are beyond your control. There’s no guarantee that other websites will link to you. Plus, you need backlinks for all your locations to optimize your search engine presence. However, get your strategy right, and it’s worth the effort.
Here are some ways you can get links for your franchises:
Befriend local journalists, and they’ll give you a heads-up when they need a quote for a story.
Partner with related local businesses. For example, if you run a coffee shop, join forces with a bakery.
Hold special events, sponsor local sports teams, or run a competition to get links in the local press.
Use tools like Ubersuggest to identify the backlinks your competitors have. You can then approach the same websites to see if they’ll link to your franchise as well.
9. Ensure NAP Consistency
A NAP (or NAP citation) is a mention of your franchise’s name, address, and phone number on a website.
This can be your own website, a directory, a social media profile, or another company’s site.
NAP citations are significant to local SEO success. They show the search engines that your business is active and legitimate.
It’s important to make sure your franchise name, address, and phone number are accurate and consistent across all platforms to maximize visibility. Accurate citations across the internet increase your authority. Similarly, accurate information helps potential customers find you more easily.
10. Optimize E-E-A-T on Local Pages
E-E-A-T stands for “experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.”
Google wants to prioritize the most credible and reliable websites in the search engine results. It uses the E-E-A-T framework in its Search Quality Rater Guidelines to determine which content to promote.
E-E-A-T is especially important on your money or your life (YMYL) content. These are websites with subject matter that could affect someone’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.
To optimize E-E-A-T on your franchise’s local pages, include a variety of content, such as customer reviews, product descriptions, contact information, FAQs, and informational articles.
Doing this will help build trust and credibility with search engines and customers. It can also help with AI visibility since Google’s AI Overviews strongly favor pages with visible E-E-A-T signals.
Another good way to enhance your franchise SEO is to showcase your credentials. For example, if you run a daycare franchise, telling customers about the qualifications and certifications of your employees can help build your credibility.
It encourages customers to stay on your website and convert while attracting backlinks and helping you rank.
The great thing about content marketing is how many forms it takes. Whatever you sell, wherever your franchise operates, and whatever your budget, you can create content that prospective customers want to engage with.
The blog above is from the Molly Maid website. It focuses on cleaning tips readers can use, so even if you end up not using their services, the content still has value.
These content types work especially well for franchise SEO, as you can focus on both local and national topics and trends:
Blog posts
Podcasts
Video content
Infographics
Social media posts
To get started with content marketing, get clear on your target market and their pain points. Then address those pain points with helpful, well-structured content. Each piece should follow an intuitive format of headings, subheadings, and short paragraphs that make the reading experience easy and informative.
From there, work in your keywords naturally, and you’ll have SEO-optimized content that answers your audience’s questions and encourages them to use your product or services.
12. Encourage Local and Online Content Reviews
More than 9 in 10 (93 percent) of customers say they read customer reviews before purchasing a product. The more positive reviews you can generate, the more likely prospective customers are to buy from you.
Having lots of reviews builds trust and entices customers to use your products or services, all while supporting local SEO. Reviews posted on platforms like Google Business Profile can include keywords customers naturally use, which helps improve your relevance in local search results.
While these keywords may not directly boost your website’s rankings, they can enhance visibility on the review platform itself, making it easier for potential customers to find your business. Additionally, positive reviews serve as powerful social proof, showing future customers that others trust and value your business, which can drive more conversions.
The easiest way to get reviews is just to ask. Send an email to customers after they use your services and ask them to leave a review, whether on your Google Business Profile, your Facebook page, or a review platform like Tripadvisor.
Be sure to respond to all reviews, whether they’re positive or negative.
According to BrightLocal, 80 percent of consumers say they’re likely to use a business that takes the time to respond to all its reviews.
13. Consider Franchise PPC to Complement Your SEO
SEO is a long game. It builds durable, compounding visibility, but it can take months for a new franchise location to start pulling meaningful organic traffic. That’s where paid advertising comes in.
Using franchise pay-per-click (PPC) tactics can put your franchise at the top of search results right away, which is especially useful when opening a new branch or trying to stay visible during high-competition seasons.
A few things to keep in mind:
Geographic targeting matters as much as it does for SEO. Structure your campaigns by location so individual branches aren’t bidding against each other and driving up costs.
Protect your branded terms. Searches like “[Franchise Name] near me” signal high intent, and competitors can bid on your brand name even when your organic rankings are solid. Running paid ads on those keywords keeps that traffic where it belongs.
Franchise SEO Tools
Running franchise SEO without the right tools gets tough fast, especially as you add locations to your portfolio. These will help keep your campaigns effective, whether you manage one location or 100:
Ubersuggest: This is my go-to for keyword research, competitor backlink analysis, and surfacing the local search terms your franchise should be ranking for. It’s especially handy when you need to compare how individual locations stack up against nearby competitors.
Google Business Profile Manager: If you’re managing more than a handful of GBP listings, the bulk location management features save serious time. You can update hours, services, and descriptions across multiple branches in one go.
Screaming Frog or Ahrefs Site Audit: Both crawl your site at scale and flag duplicate content, canonical tag issues, and thin location pages. This is critical when you have dozens (or hundreds) of near-identical templated pages.
BrightLocal or Whitespark: These are built specifically for local SEO. Use them to audit NAP citations and track rankings location by location.
Google Search Console: It’s free, and it’s still one of the most powerful tools out there. Monitor indexation, Core Web Vitals, and per-location performance straight from the source.
FAQs
What is franchise SEO?
SEO for franchises is the practice of optimizing your website (or websites) so you rank as high as possible in the search engine results for all locations you operate in.
How do start building an SEO program for a franchise?
Focus on three things: a strong corporate site, optimized local landing pages for each location, and a fully built-out Google Business Profile for every branch. Consistent NAP citations and local reviews do the heavy lifting from there.
Should franchises have separate URLs for local SEO?
Yes. Each location should live on its own URL, typically as a subfolder (yoursite.com/chicago). This lets you target city-specific keywords, build local backlinks, and rank in the right geographic SERPs without competing against your other branches.
How do you jumpstart local SEO for new franchise locations?
Claim the GBP listings, publish the location pages, and pursue local citations and reviews immediately. Prioritize getting your first 10 to 15 reviews within the opening month, since fresh listings with active engagement tend to climb the Local Pack faster.
How do local events and sponsorships boost franchise SEO?
They earn local backlinks and brand mentions from community sites. Sponsoring a youth sports team or charity 5K race often gets your franchise listed on organizer pages, news outlets, and event recaps, which are exactly the kinds of locally relevant signals Google rewards.
Plus, the best part is that it works whether you sell sandwiches, smoothies, or software solutions.
Remember that when it comes to SEO for franchises, you’ve got to be consistent.
Make sure your information appears the same across all platforms and that each of your location pages uses the same branding and tone of voice. This also means optimizing your content and online presence for AI Overviews, as they’re quickly becoming the new frontier for local visibility.
http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png00Dubado Solutionshttp://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.pngDubado Solutions2026-08-10 19:00:002026-08-10 19:00:00SEO Tips and Strategies for Franchises: A Guide for 2026
SaaS SEO requires a strategy built for long sales cycles and global competition.
Map your content to every stage of the buyer journey, from awareness-stage blog posts to decision-stage case studies and comparison pages.
AI search has reshaped how buyers research software, with 51 percent of B2B software buyers now starting with an AI chatbot more often than Google. That means optimizing as much for AI citations as search rankings.
Build authority through technical SEO, high-quality content, digital PR, and a strong presence on third-party review sites like G2 and Capterra.
There are few better traffic sources for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies than organic search.
Recent data shows that B2B SaaS companies see a 702 percent return on investment (ROI) from their SEO efforts. That’s a huge number, and it makes a ton of sense.
With the right SaaS SEO campaign, you can acquire users for free and at scale. Best of all, many of those users arrive intending to make a purchase.
So, how do you get your website to dominate the search engine results pages (SERPs)? And how do you keep those visitors on your site and convert them to customers?
SEO for SaaS companies has to account for the unique features of the industry. SaaS brands have a very different target market and customer journey than, say, a local business or a law firm. Your SaaS SEO strategy needs to reflect this.
In this SaaS SEO guide, I’ll show you how to build a strategy that checks all the right boxes. We’ll cover the benefits of generating organic traffic for SaaS businesses and walk through actionable steps you can use to improve your SEO positioning today.
What Is SaaS SEO?
SaaS SEO is search engine optimization that helps software-as-a-service brands rank higher in Google. It covers the activities that drive search engine traffic, including:
Keyword research
Content creation
On-page SEO
Link building
The difference is how you approach each one.
Google’s ranking factors are the same across industries, but SaaS brings its own opportunities and challenges.
The SaaS Industry and What Makes It Unique for SEO
The SaaS industry has its own quirks, and you’ll want to keep them in mind when building your SEO strategy.
For one, competition is fierce. Plenty of businesses offer similar services, and some are working with much larger marketing budgets. Comparison sites like Capterra and G2 pile on, too. Their domain authority is strong enough that they regularly outrank individual SaaS brands for product-related queries.
Oh, and your competition is worldwide, not local, which means global SEO considerations come into play from the start.
AI search has reshaped how SaaS buyers research and discover tools. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews now answer many top-of-funnel questions directly in the results.
That means fewer informational clicks reach your site. According to GrowthSRC, Google’s average click-through rate (CTR) for the No. 1 ranking position dropped 32 percent year-over-year, falling from 28 percent in 2024 to 19 percent in 2025 after the AI Overviews rollout.
For SaaS marketers, the goal is now to rank in traditional search results and be cited in the AI answers that show up in front of your buyers.
The SaaS Buyer Journey
The SaaS customer journey often involves weeks or months of research and decision-making.
That means your focus should be on long-term SEO strategies, such as content marketing and technical optimization. A “quick fix” approach won’t be as effective.
You’ll also need content for every stage of the journey. It’s not enough to create top-of-the-funnel content to attract people and hope they convert. You need product-focused content to show readers why they should choose your tool over a competitor’s.
You probably won’t get a conversion the first time someone visits your site, as the image below from Salespanel shows. Your SEO plan needs to build sustained authority in your space over time. That’s how you stay visible in search results and keep attracting potential customers to your site.
The Salespanel graphic maps the full lifecycle (awareness, consideration, acquisition, service, and loyalty). For SEO planning, though, marketers will more likely work from a simpler model focused on where content does the heavy lifting.
HubSpot’s three-stage framework is a good starting point:
Awareness: Educational blog posts and guides that answer the problem your tool solves.
Consideration: Comparison pages, alternative roundups, and integration content that helps buyers shortlist you.
Decision: Case studies, ROI calculators, and product-led landing pages that close the gap between interest and signup.
It’s not just new customers you have to think about, though.
Because SaaS brands use a subscription-based business model, you need to be constantly thinking about how to retain customers. Your B2B SaaS SEO strategy will need to reflect this by creating content that simultaneously attracts new users, educates existing customers, and showcases your authority.
Benefits of SEO for SaaS Businesses
Done well, SEO supports SaaS marketing efforts. It puts you in front of potential customers who are actively seeking what you sell.
The global SaaS market reached $315.7 billion in 2025, is projected to hit $375.6 billion in 2026, and could reach nearly $1.5 trillion by 2034. Capturing even a sliver of that growth means investing in SEO.
If you’re not sold yet, here are more benefits of SEO for SaaS brands:
Increased brand visibility and credibility. The more your content appears in the search, the more reputable your brand will become. This can be a deciding factor when potential customers are choosing between you and a competitor.
Scalable traffic. There is a huge compounding factor with SEO. The more content you create and the more links you build, the more your month-on-month traffic will grow.
Lower-cost acquisition. Putting more effort into your SEO reduces your dependence on paid marketing. As is the case in an industry with high ad costs, anything to alleviate some of that spend will be helpful for SaaS companies.
Increased product awareness. The more your product shows up in search engines, the easier it will be for your sales team to talk about your product because customers will have probably seen it before.
Helps to convert prospects from other channels. The SEO content you create is multipurpose and can be used by sales teams to convert prospects from other marketing channels, such as social media and pay-per-click (PPC) ads.
Improve your user experience. Many SEO tasks also improve user experience, such as optimizing for speed, navigation, and readability. This helps ensure that potential customers stay on your website longer and are more likely to convert.
Stronger brand health. Organic search data can flag early signs of shifting brand trust or product satisfaction, giving SaaS teams a real-time read on how the market perceives them and a chance to course-correct before issues show up in churn or pipeline.
Regular SEO work also helps you hold on to the rankings you’ve earned. Search engines constantly update their algorithms, so refreshing content and earning new links will keep you ahead of the game.
More and more buyers are searching online for products, too. More than two-thirds (67 percent) of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience, and 45 percent say they used AI during a recent purchase. That means you need to appear in search engines and AI Overviews if you want your product on your audience’s shortlist.
SEO also plays well with the B2B industry’s long sales cycles. A single paid ad isn’t going to be enough to keep your prospects on the hook. You need a regular stream of content that showcases your authority and keeps your prospects in your funnel if you want to succeed. Only SEO can achieve that.
Best Practices for Improving Your SaaS SEO Strategy
SEO for SaaS companies takes more than publishing a few blogs and hoping for the best. It succeeds when keyword research, on-page optimization, technical SEO, and off-page authority all work together.
Here’s how to approach each one.
Best Practices for SaaS Keyword Research
Before optimizing your website for SEO, it’s important to do keyword research to identify the terms and phrases potential customers use when searching for your SaaS tool.
Start by creating a list of relevant keywords related to your business and the products or services that you offer. This can include words and phrases related to your software’s features and general topics in your industry.
You’ll also want to choose keywords that map to each phase of the buyer journey. That’s even more important now that AI search favors content that closely matches user intent.
Think beyond the keyword itself. Ask what the searcher is trying to accomplish, then create content that answers that need. The better your content matches intent, the more likely it is to rank in search results and appear in AI-generated answers.
Once you have a shortlist of keywords, use a tool like Ubersuggest to compare their search volume and competition. That will help you prioritize the opportunities with the greatest potential.
For example, searching for “customer data management platform” shows you how often people search for the term and which related keywords are worth exploring next.
Don’t worry if your initial keyword list is short. SaaS companies often operate in highly specialized, competitive markets where obvious keyword opportunities are limited.
That doesn’t mean the opportunity isn’t there.
First, don’t get hung up on search volume. A keyword that brings in even a dozen visits per month can result in a sale that delivers a return on your investment.
Second, focus on your product’s features and the problems they solve for customers. These kinds of queries may be hyper-specific, but they also tend to have strong purchase intent. You can also create vs. pages that compare your product with your competitors.
Again, these bottom-of-the-funnel keywords are great at driving high-intent traffic.
Source: https://www.rock.so/blog/asana-vs-monday
Third, look at what your competitors are ranking for. Use a tool like Ubersuggest to mine your competitors’ websites and find relevant keywords you can rank for, too.
The more you understand your competitors’ content strategies, the easier it will be to identify gaps you can fill with better, more useful content.
Strong keyword research lays the foundation for every other part of your SaaS SEO strategy.
Best Practices for On-Page SaaS SEO
On-page SEO involves optimizing the pages on your website so they’re easy for both search engines and people to understand.
To improve on-page SEO, start with the fundamentals. Write descriptive page titles and meta descriptions, organize your content with clear headings, optimize your images with descriptive alt text, and add internal links that guide readers to related resources. These elements help search engines understand your content while making it easier for visitors to navigate your site.
The more relevant information you provide on a single page, the better your chances of ranking in the SERPs.
Great on-page SEO, however, starts with the quality of your content. If your page doesn’t answer a searcher’s question better than what’s already ranking, no amount of optimization will make up the difference.
So, what separates great content from average content?
First, it fully addresses the reader’s problem. It goes beyond the basics and answers the follow-up questions they’re likely to have instead of forcing them back to the search results.
Second, it provides an exceptional user experience. It’s well-structured and easy to read, broken into sections with headings, lists, images, and other elements to help users scan and digest information quickly.
This blog post from ClickUp is a good example of clear structure and strong formatting.
Best Practices for Technical SaaS SEO
Technical SEO involves making changes to your website’s back end that are not visible to users but can still have a major impact on search engine visibility.
To optimize your technical SEO, start by optimizing site speed so your pages load quickly. Next, create an XML sitemap and submit it to search engines so they can easily crawl and index your pages.
Also, make sure to set up structured data, such as schema markup, to better understand the content on your page and help improve Google rankings. This helps search engines determine what each page is about, which in turn helps them return more relevant results for user queries.
It’s also important that your website is mobile-friendly and works properly on all devices. This will improve the user experience and enhance your chances of ranking in SERPs.
Best Practices for Off-Page SaaS SEO
Off-page SEO builds your website’s authority beyond your own domain. The biggest ranking signal is still high-quality backlinks from trusted, relevant websites that show search engines your content is worth recommending.
Below is an example of Twilio backlinking to SpotHero’s website.
One of the easiest ways to find link-building opportunities is to analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles. Tools like Ubersuggest can show you which websites already link to competing SaaS companies, giving you a shortlist of publications and blogs worth targeting.
Here’s an example using Twilio.com:
Note: If you click the orange “one link per domain” button, it will remove repeat domains and give you a much more manageable list.
You don’t have to rely on outreach alone, though. Original research, industry surveys, reports, free tools, and useful resources naturally attract links because people want to reference them. Building relationships with industry publications and influencers can amplify that effect even further.
The goal is to earn links from websites your audience already trusts. Those links strengthen your authority and drive qualified referral traffic at the same time.
Creating Your SaaS Strategy: Step By Step
Now that we’ve covered the core pillars of SaaS SEO, it’s time to put them into action. Use the framework below to build a content-based SEO strategy that attracts qualified traffic and supports long-term growth.
This process breaks down into eight steps:
1. Set Goals and KPIs
Start by defining measurable goals for your SaaS SEO strategy. SaaS companies typically focus on attracting prospective buyers, driving traffic to free demos and converting them into paid users, and educating and retaining current users.
Next, choose the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure success. Track metrics like organic search visibility, keyword rankings, website traffic, and lead generation rate. That way, you’ll know what’s working and where to adjust your strategy as you go.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Next, determine your target audience. Are they engineers? Marketing operations leaders? Business owners? Knowing who you are targeting helps you create content tailored to their needs.
3. Identify Their Pain Points
Once you know your target audience, focus on their needs and the kind of content they want. Identify topics that are relevant to them and create content that offers value, solves their problems, and answers their questions.
4. Analyze Best-Fitting Keywords
Now it’s time to put your keyword research into action. Use the terms you’ve identified to build content that matches search intent and supports each stage of the buyer journey. Then optimize your titles, headings, body copy, and URLs so search engines can clearly understand what each page is about.
In the example below, Gartner targets the keyword “customer data management platform” consistently across the title, meta description, and URL, reinforcing the page’s relevance for that search.
5. Set Campaign Goals and Tracking Abilities
Now that you’re ready to start creating content, you’ll need to revisit goal-setting on the campaign level. Set measurable goals for each campaign to track performance. You should also establish a tracking system (Use my SEO templates if you’re not sure where to start) to measure the success of each piece of content you produce and make changes accordingly.
6. Produce Content
Create high-quality content that matches search intent and gives readers a reason to choose your page over the competition. Use clear headings, visuals, examples, and other formatting elements to make complex topics easier to scan and understand.
7. Distribute Content
Publishing is only the beginning. Promote your content through your website, email newsletters, social media, and other marketing channels to maximize its reach. Then monitor its performance and refine your approach based on what’s driving traffic and conversions.
8. Monitor Results and Optimize Based on Findings
Your job isn’t over once your content goes live. Regularly optimizing your content based on analytics data can significantly improve your organic search visibility and get closer to achieving your SaaS SEO goals.
Once a year is a good baseline timeframe for content review and refreshing, but ultimately, you should review your traffic and make adjustments based on what’s being read and what’s not.
Successful SaaS SEO Strategies
Looking for inspiration? Here are a few SaaS brands that have built strong organic visibility and the SEO strategies that helped them get there.
Adobe XD
To grow awareness of Adobe XD, its interface design and prototyping software, Adobe created a content-focused community targeting design professionals.
With the help of my agency, Adobe created an intent-based content strategy, backed by in-depth keyword, competitive, and content gap research. We also incorporated technical best practices, optimizing page speed, schema markup, and internal linking.
The results? A 648 percent increase in page one rankings and over 25,000 downloads in the first six months, with just under half of all traffic coming from search engines.
Canva
If you want an example of how to improve your SaaS SEO through backlinks, look no further than Canva.
The design platform has created hundreds of backlink magnets through its template pages. Covering everything from letterheads and invoices to coupons and invitations, these pages give users everything they need to create a great-looking design. And this means that websites provide a lot of value to their readers by linking to them.
As a result, Canva has acquired backlinks from highly authoritative domains such as The Next Web, Yahoo, and Thrillist.
But it doesn’t just wait for the links to roll in. Canva engages in personalized outreach to win those backlinks from target websites.
The result?
They have over 25 million backlinks from 280,000 domains and rank for over 5 million keywords, according to Ahrefs.
Smartlook
Product analytics and insights tool Smartlook used a product-focused keyword research strategy to break into the U.S. market and take on established goliaths like Hotjar.
They achieved this via several strategies.
The first was to improve existing landing pages that targeted competitor-style keywords like “Hotjar alternative.” While these pages were well-designed, they lacked sufficient depth of content to rank well on Google. Smartlook added much more information to these pages to better meet searcher intent and created new pages that comprehensively covered each topic.
Cisco has since acquired Smartlook and continues to operate as part of its portfolio, but the SEO strategy remains just as relevant today. Building comprehensive comparison pages around high-intent keywords is still an effective way for SaaS companies to capture buyers evaluating their options.
Verint
A clear example of what a strong SaaS SEO strategy can achieve is our work with Verint, a customer experience software company serving more than 9,800 brands across 175 countries.
As Verint prepared for a major website migration, including multiple blog and acquired business unit migrations, the challenge was preserving existing rankings while growing non-branded organic traffic in a highly competitive market.
We partnered with Verint’s product and marketing teams to build an SEO strategy around the migration. That included technical fixes for Core Web Vitals, mapping redirects, and content audits using our 6Rs framework to determine what content should be reformatted, repurposed, refreshed, retired, redirected, or simply remain as is.
The broader strategy also incorporated localization for global markets and a digital PR initiative to strengthen domain authority.
Source: https://www.verint.com/blog/
Within 30 days of launch, Verint achieved a:
210 percent increase in non-branded organic search clicks year over year
33 percent increase in keywords ranking in positions one through 10
32 percent increase in total organic search clicks year-over-year
The results show what’s possible with a coordinated SaaS SEO program.
SaaS and AI Search
AI search has become a fixture in the SaaS buyer journey. Prospects who used to start with a Google search are now asking ChatGPT to compare tools, prompting Perplexity for vendor shortlists or scanning Google’s AI Overviews before clicking anywhere.
According to G2’s 2026 AI Search Insight Report, 51 percent of B2B software buyers now start their software research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, and 71 percent rely on AI chatbots somewhere in the research process.
For SaaS marketers, this changes what visibility means. Ranking on page one still matters, but getting cited inside an AI answer matters, too.
If a buyer asks ChatGPT for the best project management tool for remote teams and your product isn’t mentioned, you’ve lost the discovery moment entirely. The same G2 research found that 69 percent of buyers reported AI chatbots surfaced information that led them to choose a different vendor than expected.
To keep your audience engaged, your SaaS SEO strategy should now account for:
Clear, well-structured content that LLMs can parse and pull from with confidence.
Strong E-E-A-T signals like author bylines, original data, and expert quotes that build trust with both search engines and AI tools.
Presence on trusted third-party sites such as G2, Capterra, and respected industry publications. A recent SE Ranking study found that sites with profiles on review platforms like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot were three times more likely to be cited by ChatGPT.
Branded content that defines your category so your name surfaces when buyers ask about the problem you solve.
FAQs
What is SaaS SEO?
SaaS SEO is the practice of optimizing a software-as-a-service company’s website to rank higher in search engines for keywords that matter to its buyers. It accounts for the industry’s specific nuances, such as long sales cycles and a subscription-based revenue model.
How important is SEO in a SaaS business?
SEO is one of the highest-leverage growth channels available to SaaS companies. It compounds over time, lowers your dependence on paid acquisition, and meets buyers where they’re already researching solutions. With B2B’s stretched-out sales cycles, a steady stream of search-visible content can keep prospects engaged from first touch to close.
How SaaS companies improve their SEO?
Start with a technical audit to fix page speed and indexing issues. Then build topic clusters that map to each stage of the buyer journey, target bottom-funnel terms like comparisons and alternatives, and earn authority through digital PR and third-party reviews on G2 and Capterra.
What’s more important, a SaaS content strategy or SEO strategy?
They aren’t competing approaches. Your content strategy defines what you publish and why, and your SEO strategy ensures that content gets found. The strongest SaaS programs treat them as a single integrated effort, where keyword research informs content topics, and content quality drives rankings and conversions.
How do I combine SEO and PPC for SaaS lead generation?
Use PPC to capture high-intent commercial queries while SEO builds long-term authority on informational and comparison terms. Share keyword data between teams to identify which paid terms convert well enough to warrant organic investment, and use retargeting to re-engage organic visitors who didn’t convert on the first visit.
Conclusion
SaaS SEO is one of the most effective ways to attract qualified buyers throughout the customer journey. The stronger your strategy, the more opportunities you’ll have to build awareness and convert prospects into long-term customers.
While your industry may be more technical than others, following the advice in this SaaS SEO guide will help you achieve better organic search visibility and get closer to your goals.
At the same time, search itself is changing.
AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are changing how buyers discover software, while Google’s AI Overviews are reshaping what visibility looks like on the SERP.
The SaaS brands that win going forward will be the ones building content for both traditional search and AI answers, while mapping every piece to a real stage in the buyer journey
Claude Design is an experimental AI-powered design workspace from Anthropic, built on Claude Opus 4.7.
The tool is built for rapid ideation and early-stage prototyping, not final production design.
A standout capability lets the tool ingest a company’s codebase and design files to apply brand guidelines automatically.
Users can iterate through conversation, direct edits, and comments, then export to PDF, PPTX, Canva, or Claude Code workflows.
Claude Design is a complement to tools like Figma and Canva, not a replacement for them.
Most design tools are built for designers. That’s been the assumption for decades, and it’s created a bottleneck that marketers, product managers, and content teams know well: you have an idea, but getting it into a visual form means waiting on someone else’s schedule.
Claude Design is Anthropic’s attempt to change that. Launched in April 2026, the AI-powered design workspace lets you turn a natural language prompt into a polished mockup, prototype, slide deck, or one-pager. No design background required. For user experience (UX) teams and the non-designers who work alongside them, the implications are worth paying attention to.
What Is Claude Design?
On April 17, 2026, Anthropic rolled out Claude Design as an experimental AI-powered design workspace. The tool runs on Claude Opus 4.7 and targets two audiences: professional designers who want to move faster during early-stage work, and non-designers who need to turn ideas into visual assets without going through a full design cycle.
The outputs it can produce include prototypes, slide decks, mockups, and one-pagers. All of it is driven by natural language prompts, meaning you describe what you want and the tool builds a working draft.
Iteration happens through conversation. You can refine outputs by typing follow-up instructions, making direct edits, leaving comments, or adjusting built-in controls. When you’re ready to move the work downstream, export options include PDF, PPTX, Canva, and Claude Code workflows.
Anthropic is positioning this as a complement to existing design tools, not a replacement. The pitch is efficiency at the ideation stage, not a takeover of the production workflow.
How Claude Design Fits Into a UX Workflow
UX work has always had a front-loaded bottleneck. The ideation phase, where teams explore directions before committing to a concept, is time-intensive and resource-heavy. A designer has to be involved from the start, even when the work is exploratory and could change completely by the next round.
Claude Design targets that specific problem. The ability to generate a working mockup or wireframe-level prototype from a prompt shortens the gap between having an idea and being able to react to something concrete. Teams can evaluate directions earlier, kill weak concepts faster, and give designers cleaner briefs when they do get involved.
The ability for Claude Design to operate at any point during the UX workflow means design teams can focus more on optimizing their product for real user needs.
That’s the practical value. Not replacing the designer, but moving the starting line.
The Brand Consistency Feature
The most notable capability in Claude Design for teams working at scale is its ability to ingest a company’s codebase and design files to automatically apply brand guidelines to all outputs.
For anyone managing campaigns across multiple channels or coordinating between an in-house team and external agencies, visual consistency is a constant problem. Guidelines get interpreted differently. Templates drift. New team members make judgment calls.
Claude Design’s ingestion feature gives the tool a reference point so that outputs stay on-brand from the first draft. That matters most during ideation, when speed tends to come at the cost of consistency.
What It Means for Non-Designers
Marketing teams, product managers, and founders regularly need to communicate visual ideas without a designer in the room. A competitive analysis needs a one-pager. A product pitch needs a slide. A new campaign concept needs something more than a paragraph in a doc.
Claude Design lowers the barrier for producing those assets. You don’t need to know how to use Figma. You describe what you need, refine it through conversation, and export something usable. That’s a real change in how quickly a non-designer can get an idea out of their head and in front of other people.
The caveat worth noting: Claude Design does consume tokens at a meaningful rate. For teams working within usage limits, it’s worth being selective about where you deploy it. Early-stage ideation and internal presentations are good candidates. Final client-facing deliverables probably aren’t, at least not without a designer’s review.
Where Claude Design Fits in the Broader AI Design Space
AI design tools have been proliferating fast. Canva has added generative features. Adobe has Firefly. Figma has integrated AI into its core workflow. Claude Design is entering a crowded category.
What sets it apart is the conversational interface and the brand ingestion capability. Most AI design tools work from templates or style presets. Claude Design works from a description, and can theoretically hold the logic of your brand in memory for a session. That’s a different kind of flexibility.
The broader signal here is Anthropic’s push into enterprise productivity. Claude Design is part of a larger pattern: AI moving beyond text generation into the full range of knowledge work, including design, code, and creative assets. For UX practitioners and the teams they work with, that shift is going to keep accelerating.
How to Start Using AI Design Tools in Your Workflow
If you want to test Claude Design or similar tools in a practical context, here’s a straightforward approach:
Start with low-stakes assets. Internal presentations, early-round mockups, and concept sketches are good starting points. These are outputs that benefit from speed and don’t require production polish.
Feed in your brand guidelines upfront. If the tool supports file ingestion, use it. Starting with your brand reference reduces back-and-forth in the iteration phase.
Treat outputs as drafts, not finals. AI design tools produce starting points. Plan for a designer review before anything goes to a client or ships publicly.
Test it as a brief-writing tool. Even if you don’t use the visual output directly, generating a mockup can help you communicate to a designer exactly what you’re looking for. That alone can cut revision cycles.
Track time saved in the ideation phase. The value is in speed, not in replacing human judgment. Measure it there.
FAQs
What is Claude Design?
Claude Design is an AI-powered design workspace from Anthropic. It runs on Claude Opus 4.7 and lets users create mockups, prototypes, slide decks, and one-pagers through natural language prompts. Outputs can be exported to PDF, PPTX, Canva, and Claude Code workflows.
Who is Claude Design built for?
Anthropic designed it for both professional designers who want to move faster during ideation and non-designers who need to produce visual assets without full design expertise. Marketing teams, product managers, and founders are natural users.
Does Claude Design replace Figma or Canva?
No. Claude Design is positioned as a complement to existing tools, not a replacement. Anthropic is targeting the ideation phase of design work, not production-level output. Final deliverables will still benefit from a professional designer’s review and tools built for that purpose.
What can Claude Design export?
Outputs can be exported to PDF, PPTX, Canva, or Claude Code workflows. This makes it straightforward to hand off early-stage work to existing design or development pipelines.
What is the main limitation of Claude Design?
The tool consumes tokens at a meaningful rate, which is worth keeping in mind for teams working within usage limits. For now, it works best for early-stage ideation rather than high-volume production work.
Conclusion
AI design tools are no longer a future consideration. Claude Design is live, and it’s targeting one of the most persistent inefficiencies in creative work: the time between having an idea and being able to react to it visually.
For UX teams, the case for testing it is straightforward. If it shortens ideation cycles and helps non-designers communicate more clearly, it earns its place in the workflow. For the rest of us, it’s another signal that the tools available to knowledge workers are changing faster than most teams are adapting.
Want to understand how AI tools fit into a broader digital marketing strategy? My guide to AI in marketing is a good place to start. You can also consult with the NP Digital team to figure out which emerging tools are worth prioritizing for your specific goals.
http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png00Dubado Solutionshttp://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.pngDubado Solutions2026-08-06 16:00:002026-08-06 16:00:00What Claude Design Could Mean for UX
As AI agents reshape how people discover and buy products, SEO is evolving beyond rankings and clicks. In the latest episode of The Page 2 Podcast, Yoast Principal SEO Alex Moss joined Jon Clark and Joe DeVita to explore what it takes for brands to be selected by AI agents, from structured data and entity relationships to markdown, llms.txt, and creating a machine-readable source of truth.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
What it means to optimize for AI agents instead of search clicks
Why markdown can outperform HTML for LLMs
Whether llms.txt is worth implementing today
How entity maps and structured data help AI understand your content
What businesses should prioritize to prepare for the next generation of AI-powered search and commerce
Whether you’re just starting to explore AI search or already experimenting with new optimization standards, this conversation offers practical insights into where SEO is headed and how to prepare for what’s next. Give it a listen to future-proof your SEO strategy for the age of AI.
http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png00Dubado Solutionshttp://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.pngDubado Solutions2026-08-05 11:57:162026-08-05 11:57:16The Page 2 Podcast: What SEOs must know to get chosen by AI
AI visibility metrics help uncover pre-click influences that might not be obvious from search terms, conversion tracking, landing page analysis, or other conventional data points. They add context that helps explain why campaigns attract the right customers, the wrong customers, or no customers at all.
Performance marketers are paid to find the most valuable customers with the most efficient spend. The baseline is understanding what happened after someone searched, clicked, or converted. But focusing exclusively on cleaning up existing demand is a short-sighted goal.
AI experiences (and what goes into serving them) are just as important to performance workflows because AI can shape what customers know, which brands they consider, and the language they use before they ever reach an ad or website.
What AI visibility metrics reveal
AI visibility metrics help answer two questions:
What information did an AI system retrieve to support its response?
Was your brand part of the information that shaped that response?
Three signals are especially useful:
Grounding queries show the retrieval searches AI systems use to gather supporting information and the broader topics your brand appears in.
Citations show when your content is referenced in an AI-generated response.
Share of authority shows how much citation activity belongs to your domain compared with other cited domains for the same topic or query set.
See exactly how your competitors win.
Uncover the keywords, ads, landing pages, and strategies driving your competitors’ paid search success—and find your next opportunity to outperform them.
Analyze your competitors
How to put AI visibility to work
Grounding queries show how AI interprets human intent
Search terms show what a person typed. Grounding queries show the information an AI system retrieved to help answer that person’s question.
A single prompt can generate several grounding queries covering comparisons, pricing, reviews, product details, availability, implementation questions, or other supporting topics. Those queries show how AI translates a human need into retrievable information.
It gives you another way to evaluate whether landing pages, product descriptions, and campaign messaging communicate the right value.
If AI systems consistently associate your brand with services you don’t offer, audiences you don’t want, or use cases that don’t convert well, that mismatch may eventually show up in paid campaigns as traffic that looks relevant but performs poorly.
For example, a B2B company offering executive coaching may not want to be interpreted the same way as a company offering tactical sales training. Both ideas may be semantically similar, but they can attract different buyers, budgets, expectations, and conversion paths.
If grounding queries consistently associate the company with lower-value training searches instead of higher-value advisory or coaching needs, that’s a signal worth investigating.
The useful signal isn’t whether one phrase is universally better than another. It’s whether grounding queries, search terms, landing page behavior, and conversion quality point to the same interpretation of the same offer.
What to do with this insight
If you see a lot of relevant grounding queries, that can be a strong opportunity to test AI-powered query matching with Performance Max, AI Max, or other AI-supported campaign types.
At minimum, grounding queries can inform keyword testing, search themes, creative ideas, and landing page updates. The key is to treat grounding queries as inputs, not instructions.
A grounding query isn’t the same as a keyword. It’s a clue about how AI systems interpret intent. Before acting on it, ask:
Does this query reflect a product or service we actually want to sell?
Does it match the customers we want more of?
Do we have a landing page that supports this intent?
Would this work better as a keyword, search theme, creative test, or content update?
Can we measure whether the test improves conversion quality?
If grounding queries and search terms overlap in valuable ways, that may validate that AI systems and customers are interpreting your offer similarly
If they don’t overlap, investigate before changing bids or budgets. The issue may be messaging, landing page clarity, or content gaps rather than campaign settings.
Citations and topics help you preview how AI understands your brand
A citation doesn’t mean you won the customer, the final answer, or the conversion. It means your content helped shape the AI experience. That matters because consideration can happen before a measurable click.
If your brand is cited for topics that align with your paid campaigns, your content and campaign messaging may reinforce each other. If your brand is cited for topics that don’t match what you sell, who you serve, or where you win, that may explain why some campaign traffic looks relevant on the surface but doesn’t convert well.
Topics add another layer by showing the themes, attributes, and categories AI systems associate with your brand. That can be especially useful when you’re trying to understand whether AI systems accurately represent your brand.
For example, if a cybersecurity platform wants to be known for enterprise identity protection but AI visibility reporting consistently associates it with small-business antivirus comparisons, that mismatch could be leading to lower-quality “conversions” that translate into bad data for the ad platform. What looks like a campaign settings or targeting issue could actually be a phrasing or content problem.
This is why landing page content matters. AI-powered campaign features such as final URL expansion, asset optimization, and broader matching systems also rely on how your brand, products, services, and pages are interpreted.
If AI visibility data shows that AI systems misunderstand your brand, there’s a reasonable chance campaign automation could inherit some of that confusion.
What to do with this insight
If citations and topics are misaligned, audit your landing page content before assuming the issue is bidding, budget, or audience targeting.
Look at how your priority pages describe:
The problems you solve and whether you attempt to tackle more than one.
The proof points that support the claims made in your advertising.
The customer types you want more of based on how you describe your services.
Then compare that language with the topics where AI systems cite or associate your brand.
If AI systems are pulling your brand into the wrong topics, tighten the content. Make the product category, audience, proof points, and next step easier to understand. If the right topics appear but your citations are weak, look for places where your content may be too thin, too generic, or missing the evidence needed to be useful.
Better content can strengthen paid media campaigns because AI-powered campaign tools are increasingly tasked with interpreting pages, assets, and customer context. The clearer your landing pages and content are, the easier it is for those systems to understand where your offer is relevant.
Share of authority reveals where competitors are beating you in AI recommendations
Citations show whether your content is referenced in a given grounding query.
Share of authority shows how much citation activity belongs to your domain compared with other cited domains for the same topic or grounding query. This can be a useful competitive signal because it shows where other brands may be influencing the customer’s research journey before a search, click, or conversion happens.
If competitors are cited more often on a priority topic, they may be doing a better job answering the questions customers ask before they convert. This might mean:
More accessible landing pages.
Better proof points, such as reviews and awards.
More useful product information that aligns with their feed.
Fundamentally, ask:
Are competitors doing a better job proving their value in the places AI systems use to shape recommendations?
If the answer is yes, the issue may not be that your campaigns are broken. Your content may not be giving AI systems enough clear, useful, or verifiable information to understand why your brand belongs in the recommendation set.
What to do with this insight
Use share of authority to identify where competitors are outperforming you on topics that matter to the business. Then invest in the content and landing page experiences that prove your value.
That might mean:
Building new landing pages for high-value use cases.
Expanding product or service details to include ideas mentioned in grounding queries.
Adding clearer proof points, such as reviews and awards.
Updating creative and messaging to reflect what customers and AI systems are already asking about.
Not every share-of-authority gap deserves action. If you’re underrepresented on a topic that doesn’t matter to your business, that may be fine.
But if you’re underrepresented on a high-value category, core product, branded initiative, or use case that your paid campaigns depend on, that gap deserves attention.
The performance question isn’t: “How do we become visible everywhere?” A better question is: “Where do we need stronger evidence so qualified customers are more likely to consider us?”
Every click they win is a customer you lose.
See where competitors are investing, which keywords drive their results, and how to capture more of the market.
See who’s stealing your traffic
What AI visibility adds to PPC reporting
AI visibility reporting isn’t a replacement for conversion reports, bidding reports, placement reports, or behavioral analytics. Those tools still tell you whether campaigns are working and where performance is coming from.
AI visibility adds a different perspective. It helps explain how customers, AI systems, and competitors interact with information before traditional performance metrics exist.
Google updated the Data Manager API with new audience management tools, more flexible data ingestion and expanded support for user-provided address data, making it easier for developers to maintain Customer Match lists and improve data quality.
The release is aimed at reducing manual work while providing better visibility into data issues that don’t require an ingestion request to fail.
What’s new. The headline addition is a new RemoveAllAudienceMembers method, which allows developers to clear an entire audience list in a single operation. An optional timestamp parameter also lets advertisers remove only members added before a specified date, making full audience refreshes much easier.
Google has also introduced field-level ingestion warnings. Rather than failing an entire request when optional fields contain invalid data, the API now processes valid records while returning detailed warnings that identify the problematic fields and explain why they failed validation.
The update also expands the address information that can be sent to Google Analytics destinations. Developers can now include street address, city and state or province alongside existing fields such as name, postal code and region, while user-provided data can also satisfy identifier requirements for certain multi-source events when other identifiers aren’t available.
Google has additionally released new AI agent skills in its Google Skills GitHub repository to help developers build Data Manager API integrations more efficiently within AI-assisted coding environments.
Why we care. The update removes several friction points for developers managing first-party data. Audience refreshes become simpler, ingestion issues are easier to troubleshoot without interrupting workflows, and the expanded address fields provide more flexibility when sending user data to Google Analytics.
Bottom line. The latest Data Manager API release streamlines audience management, improves error handling and expands data collection capabilities, giving developers more efficient tools for managing customer data across Google Ads, Display & Video 360 and Google Analytics.
Every click they win is a customer you lose.
See where competitors are investing, which keywords drive their results, and how to capture more of the market.
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Microsoft has updated its analytics tool, Clarity, to add branded and non-branded breakdowns to the AI Citations dashboard and AI reports. Clarity lets you filter branded versus non-branded information across query analysis and filtering.
What Microsoft said. “To make that analysis easier, Microsoft Clarity now adds branded query segmentation to the AI Citations dashboard,” Microsoft wrote. “You can now distinguish branded and non-branded grounding queries AI systems use to look up supporting information for a response,” Microsoft added.
What it looks like. Here is a screenshot from the Microsoft Clarity blog of these new updates:
What is new. Microsoft added branded vs. non-branded view across query analysis and filtering to the Clarity reports including:
Branded labels in the queries card: Individual queries are now clearly marked as branded in the queries view, so you can quickly identify brand-specific queries and understand what the AI systems looked up at a glance.
Share of Authority breakdown by query type: The Share of Authority card now breaks out results by branded and non-branded queries, giving you a clearer view of where your authority is strongest: queries that mention your brand versus more general queries.
Branded and non-branded filters: Filter dashboard data by branded or non-branded queries to compare how your visibility performs when an AI system looks up your brand directly versus broader, more general topics.
More precise citation analysis: By separating brand-led demand from generic discovery, you can better assess brand strength, identify discovery and consideration opportunities, and interpret changes in citation performance with greater confidence.
Branded labels in the queries card: Individual queries are now clearly marked as branded in the queries view, so you can quickly identify brand-specific queries and understand what the AI systems looked up at a glance.
Share of Authority breakdown by query type: The Share of Authority card now breaks out results by branded and non-branded queries, giving you a clearer view of where your authority is strongest: queries that mention your brand versus more general queries.
Branded and non-branded filters: Filter dashboard data by branded or non-branded queries to compare how your visibility performs when an AI system looks up your brand directly versus broader, more general topics.
More precise citation analysis: By separating brand-led demand from generic discovery, you can better assess brand strength, identify discovery and consideration opportunities, and interpret changes in citation performance with greater confidence.
Why we care. Being able to break down and filter your analytics reports by branded and non-branded queries can help you zone in to the data that matters to you. Having more clarity on how people find your content through AI search and chat experiences are important and useful. This update gives you a little more information to work with when it comes to understanding your AI visibility.
Be the brand AI recommends.
See where your brand appears in AI search, where competitors are winning, and what it takes to become the answer AI recommends.
Google launched dedicated Generative AI performance reports in Search Console on June 3, 2026, initially rolled out to a subset of UK-based sites.
The report tracks impressions across AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI features in Discover, broken down by pages, countries, devices, and dates.
Data begins from May 18, 2026; there is no historical backfill.
Click data is not included in the current version, which is the most significant limitation.
Google also introduced an opt-out toggle allowing sites to block content from AI features without affecting traditional organic rankings.
AI visibility and traditional organic visibility are now two distinct, separately measurable channels.
For two years, AI search performance has operated as a black box. Brands could see that AI Overviews were growing, that click-through rates were falling, and that something had changed in how Google surfaced content. But first-party data on what was actually happening inside AI features was not available.
Google changed that on June 3, 2026.
What Google Actually Launched
Google’s Search Generative AI performance reports give site owners a dedicated view inside Search Console showing how their content appears within generative AI features. Previously, any traffic or impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode were folded into the standard Performance report with no way to isolate them. That separation is now possible.
The report covers five dimensions: impressions (how often your URLs appeared in AI features), pages (which specific URLs were cited), countries (geographic breakdown of AI visibility), devices (for Search results), and dates (with hourly through monthly granularity).
The rollout launched June 3, 2026, initially for a subset of UK-based site owners. This is a direct response to the UK Competition and Markets Authority mandate, which requires Google to share this data under the Digital Markets Act. A global rollout is planned but no timeline has been confirmed. If your Search Console does not yet show the report, it is coming.
Alongside the reporting launch, Google introduced an opt-out toggle that allows site owners to exclude their content from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover AI features entirely. Critically, opting out carries no organic ranking penalty. Google has confirmed the toggle will not be used as a ranking signal for traditional search results. The toggle takes effect from June 17, 2026.
The most significant limitation of the current report is that it tracks impressions only. There is no click data, no CTR, no average position, and no query-level breakdown. You can see that your content appeared in an AI feature, but not whether anyone clicked through to your site as a result.
For performance marketers accustomed to building decisions around clicks and conversion, this creates a measurement gap. AI systems are designed to answer questions directly, which means click rates from AI features are likely structurally lower than click rates from traditional results. An impression inside an AI Overview does not confirm a visit, and given how AI Overviews behave, it may not produce one at all.
The right way to read this data, at least in its current form, is as a resonance signal. A page that earns high AI impressions is content the model finds worth citing. Cross-reference AI impressions against the organic clicks that same URL earns in the standard Performance report, and you get a genuinely useful picture: pages that perform strongly in both channels are your highest-value content assets. As one analysis put it, high AI impressions and high organic clicks on the same page is the clearest signal of what non-commodity content actually looks like. For a deeper look at how to interpret and act on AI brand visibility data, see our recent breakdown.
The data also starts from May 18, 2026, which sits inside the May 2026 core update window. Early trend interpretation should account for that overlap, since ranking shifts from the update will be mixed into the initial AI impression patterns.
Reading AI Impressions as a Strategy Signal
The absence of click data in the current report does not make AI impressions useless. It changes how they should be read.
An impression inside an AI Overview or AI Mode response means Google’s system selected your content as a grounding source for its answer. That selection reflects the same quality signals that drive strong traditional rankings: factual accuracy, topical authority, clear structure, and relevance to the specific question being answered. Pages that consistently earn AI impressions are your content assets that the model finds most citable.
Cross-referencing AI impressions with organic clicks from the standard Performance report creates a genuinely useful diagnostic. Pages with high organic clicks and high AI impressions are performing in both paradigms simultaneously.
These are your non-commodity pages: content that earns traffic from users who click through and citation from AI systems answering related questions. Pages with high AI impressions but low organic clicks may indicate content that answers queries well enough to be cited but does not generate sufficient click intent on its own. These are worth examining for conversion optimization. Pages with low AI impressions and high organic clicks may represent ranking-driven traffic that is increasingly vulnerable as AI Overviews expand into their query categories.
Should You Opt Out of AI Features?
Almost certainly not, for most brands.
The business case for opting out is narrow. Publishers with content-licensing models, paywalled material, or specific legal reasons to restrict AI citation may have legitimate reasons to consider it. For the vast majority of brands, opting out means losing a growing visibility channel, with no ranking benefit to offset it.
The opt-out toggle is most useful as a signal that Google has acknowledged the tension between feeding AI systems with publisher content and compensating those publishers for it. Having the control is meaningful. Using it defensively, without a clear strategic rationale, is not recommended.
What to Do Now
Even before your Search Console account gains access, prepare the reporting infrastructure now.
Define how AI impressions will feed into your performance reporting. AI visibility and traditional organic visibility are now distinct channels, and they need separate measurement frameworks. A page ranking well in traditional search is not the same as a page earning AI citations, even though both matter.
Identify which pages are likely candidates for AI citation in your current content mix. Content that directly answers specific questions, uses clear structure, and is factually accurate and current is more likely to surface in AI features. Those pages should be audited for completeness and optimized before the report gives you data to react to.
Set a baseline as soon as access arrives. The report currently has no historical data before May 18, 2026, which means the earlier you establish your first benchmarks, the more useful comparative data you will have going forward.
FAQs
When will I get access to the new AI report in Search Console?
The current rollout is limited to a subset of UK-based site owners. Google has said a global rollout is planned but has given no specific timeline. Monitor your Search Console account for the Generative AI section to appear.
Can I see which queries trigger AI impressions for my content?
Not in the current version. The report does not include query-level data. This is one of the most significant gaps and may be addressed in future updates.
Does opting out of AI features help my rankings?
No. Google has confirmed that the opt-out setting will not be used as a ranking signal for traditional organic search. Opting out affects AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover AI features only.
Should I treat AI impressions the same as organic impressions?
No. AI impressions indicate your content was cited inside a generative feature, not that a user was shown your link in a traditional results format. The downstream behavior is different, click rates from AI features are likely lower, and your measurement framework should reflect that distinction.
Conclusion
AI search visibility has been growing for two years with no way to measure it directly. The new GSC Generative AI performance report closes that gap, partially. Impressions data without clicks is an incomplete picture, but it is a meaningful start. The brands that build reporting frameworks around this data now, before a global rollout makes it standard practice, will be better positioned to interpret performance and make decisions as the reporting matures.
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