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Where Did My Traffic Go? Winning In The Age of AI Overviews

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Is the number of clicks on your top-ranking content starting to slip? It’s time to find out where your traffic has gone and how to get it back.

AI Overviews are reshaping SERPs as we know them. Google now answers user queries directly in the SERP, and traditional blue links are getting pushed further down the page. You might still be ranking, but your visibility is shrinking.

This doesn’t mean SEO is dead. It just means the playbook has changed. To stay competitive, you need to understand how AI Overview optimization works and start building content designed to earn those coveted AI citations.

Key Takeaways

  • AI Overviews are rerouting traffic, not killing it. Your rankings may hold, but clicks drop because Google satisfies user intent directly in the SERP.
  • Answer-first content wins. Structuring pages with concise answers, logical headings, and clear formatting increases your chances of being cited in AI Overviews.
  • Authority signals matter more than backlinks. Brand mentions, topical trust, and consistent visibility across multiple platforms influence AI citations.
  • Owning your audience is your safety net. Diversifying channels and building first-party data ensures long-term visibility, even as search behavior evolves.

Why You’re Ranking But Still Losing Traffic

If your content still ranks in the top 10 SERP positions but traffic is slipping, there’s a good chance AI overviews are the culprit. Google’s AI-generated summaries dominate the top of the page, pushing organic listings below the fold. Users get the answer they want without ever clicking. In fact, almost 60% of Google searches end without users even making a single click.

An example of an AI Overview.

You can see from this screenshot that when your search results load, there’s no organic results in site. In fact, in this instance, AI overviews even push sponsored results below the fold. This is the new reality of zero-click searches. Impressions might look steady, but clicks drop because users can satisfy their intent without leaving Google.

The solution is to stop thinking only in terms of traffic volume. Start focusing on visible influence: appearing in AI Overviews and being recognized as an authority, even when users don’t click.

AI Overviews And How They Are Turning The Funnel Upside-Down

Traditional search funnels start with discovery, move to consideration, and end in conversion. AI Overviews flip that script.

Users can start—and sometimes finish—their journey right on Google. With features like AI-generated summaries and featured snippets, the need to click through is lower than ever. Voice search and even short-form video integrations accelerate this shift, creating an environment where Google does the explaining for you.

An AI Overview for "What is Zero-Click."

For marketers, this means clicks are no longer the whole story. Your content has to deliver more than just clicks. It needs to capture attention inside the SERP and give users a reason to engage when they do click through. Strong on-page structure, engaging CTAs, and retention strategies like scroll-depth optimization now matter just as much as ranking. This is the essence of Search Everywhere optimization, which focuses on meeting users wherever they’re consuming content, not just on your site.

How To Optimize For AI Overviews

If you want your content featured in AI Overviews, you need to create pages that are easy for Google to summarize and trust. Here’s how to give Google what it wants:

  • Lead with an answer-first layout: Open your page with a concise, 2–3 sentence answer to the core query. This immediately gives AI a clear takeaway, increasing the odds of being cited in an overview. Expand into supporting details afterward with a logical flow.
  • Use structured formatting: Break your content into clean H2s and short paragraphs so Google can scan and interpret it quickly. Bulleted and numbered lists help AI extract step-by-step processes or summaries.
A graphic detailing an AI-friendly content structure.

Source

  • Add schema and FAQs: Implement FAQ and How-To schema to highlight your key answers for AI. Include a short FAQ section at the end of your article to increase your odds of citation for question-based queries.
  • Target long-tail, conversational keywords: AI Overviews thrive on natural, question-based searches. Integrate these phrases into headings and early sentences to align with how users talk to search engines and voice assistants.
  • Publish fresh, authoritative content: Share unique insights, proprietary data, or first-hand expertise to meet E-E-A-T signals—experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. AI favors credible, original content over generic summaries.
An E-E-A-T graphic.

Source

  • Support with media: Embed YouTube videos, charts, or screenshots to improve engagement and reinforce authority. Use descriptive alt text so search engines can understand and reference your visuals.

Combining structure, authority, and clarity makes it easy for AI to pull your content and keep your brand visible in the new SERP landscape.

YouTube and Video: Your Shortcut to Visibility

Video content—especially on YouTube—is one of the fastest ways to gain visibility in AI Overviews. Google and Gemini favor YouTube because it’s part of their ecosystem, and AI models naturally pull from sources they already trust.

Short, keyword-focused videos can surface in AI-generated results even if your text content isn’t cited. A 60–90 second explainer video that directly answers the search query gives AI a clean snippet to work with while also boosting your chances of appearing in video carousels.

The charts below show just how effective video is. They show the categories of YouTube videos that have shown up in AI overviews and how fast the trend of videos showing up in AI overviews has grown over time. 

Video presence in AIOs.

Source 1, Source 2

To maximize impact:

  • Create concise, educational videos tied to core keywords.
  • Embed them on relevant blog posts or landing pages to reinforce topical authority.
  • Add captions or transcripts so AI models can understand and summarize your video content.

Video can reclaim lost search visibility while building multi-surface authority across AI-driven and traditional search.

Off-Page Signals Matter More Than Backlinks

In the age of AI Overviews, Google and AI models are looking beyond traditional backlinks. They increasingly value off-page signals like brand mentions and expert quotes in reputable sources.

AI models evaluate whether your brand is recognized and trusted across the web. A mention in an industry publication, a quote in a news article, or a stat cited in a whitepaper can be as impactful as a link for AI visibility.

To strengthen your off-page signals:

  • Pursue public relations (PR) opportunities in industry-relevant media and blogs.
  • Share original data or research that journalists and peers want to reference.
  • Encourage brand discussions on platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit, and Quora, which AI crawlers frequently mine. Internally, we’ve seen tremendous growth for our client, TurboTax, by helping them launch a branded Reddit campaign—including discussions and engagement. 

The goal is to create a trustworthy footprint online. When AI sees your brand cited in multiple credible sources, you’re far more likely to be included in its summaries, even without a traditional backlink.

Build Topical Trust Across the Web

AI Overviews reward brands that show consistent authority on a topic, not just one-off content. Google and AI models look for a pattern: Are you producing relevant, high-quality content across multiple platforms that reinforces your expertise?

To build topical trust:

  • Publish blog posts, guides, and FAQs that cover your key themes in depth.
  • Share insights across social media and YouTube, giving AI more signals that your brand is active and authoritative.
  • Leverage user-generated content (UGC), like community discussions, testimonials, and real-world examples, to demonstrate authenticity.
  • Ensure your content aligns with E-E-A-T across every channel.

Maintaining a consistent and credible presence wherever your audience searches makes it easy for AI to recognize your brand as a reliable source. That recognition is what creates a trustworthy brand footprint that AI can work with.

You Need to Diversify Your Channels Now

Relying solely on Google for traffic is riskier than ever. The shrinking SERP visibility caused by AI overviews and zero-click searches means that even top-ranking content might not deliver the same ROI it once did.

To protect your brand, you need to diversify your traffic sources:

  • Combine SEO and paid search to maintain visibility and retarget your most valuable branded keywords.
  • Invest in social media, email, and YouTube to capture attention outside of Google.
  • Build a strategy that prioritizes owning your audience instead of depending on any single platform.

Diversifying channels doesn’t just protect your current visibility. It’s a great way to grow your online brand. A strong multi-channel approach captures leads you might otherwise miss, making you less vulnerable to Google’s constant evolution. Ultimately, the brands that thrive in the AI era are the ones that meet their audience everywhere, not just in search results.

Examples of channel diversification.

Source

First-Party Data Is the Safety Net

When AI Overviews dominate search, the brands that win are the ones creating proprietary insights that can’t be found anywhere else. AI models favor content that provides original data because it signals authority and adds value beyond generic summaries. Internal research is your secret weapon.

Instead of relying solely on public stats, collect your own:

  • Run audience surveys to uncover trends or opinions in your niche.
  • Conduct polls or quizzes to generate quick, shareable insights that can be repurposed into blogs and social posts.
  • Analyze internal data like customer behavior, conversion trends, or product usage to produce unique reports.
First party data collection techniques.

Source

Turn these findings into case studies and data-driven articles. Proprietary insights make your brand more likely to appear in AI Overviews and attract backlinks and press coverage, compounding your authority across the web.

FAQs

How do I optimize for AI Overviews?

Start with an answer-first structure: give a concise response in the first 2–3 sentences, then expand with supporting details. Use a clear structure with H2s and bulleted lists so Google can easily scan and summarize your content. Implement FAQ or how-to schema, and include a dedicated FAQ section to match AI’s preferred Q&A format. Fresh, authoritative content supported by brand mentions and backlinks will boost your chances of being cited.

How are AI Overviews changing the SERPs?

AI Overviews now dominate the top of Google results, pushing organic listings further down the page. This creates more zero-click searches, where users get answers without visiting your site. Even if your rankings haven’t changed, your visibility and clicks may decline. Making AI-friendly formatting and multi-channel strategies more important than ever.

Conclusion

There’s no need to panic. AI Overviews aren’t erasing traffic, they’re simply rerouting it. Your pages may still rank, but when Google’s summaries dominate the top of the SERP, visibility doesn’t always translate into clicks. The old playbook of relying on impressions and top rankings isn’t enough anymore.

To win in this era of search, your SEO strategy has to include AI overview optimization. Content needs to be structured for AI-first discovery, with clear answers and logical formatting that gains LLMs’ trust. Now, success is about building influence. When your brand appears in AI Overviews and consistently reinforces topical expertise, you maintain visibility even when users don’t land on your site.

The final step is ownership. Diversifying channels and leveraging Search Everywhere optimization gives your brand resilience, while first-party data ensures you can nurture and convert your audience on your own terms. If done right, AI can be your biggest opportunity, not just a threat.

Read more at Read More

A technical SEO blueprint for GEO: Optimize for AI-powered search

Technical SEO GEO

When it comes to AI-powered search, visibility isn’t just about ranking – it’s about being included in the answer itself.

That’s why generative engine optimization (GEO) matters. The same technical SEO practices that help search engines crawl, index, evaluate, and rank your content also improve your chances of being pulled into AI-generated responses.

The good news? If your technical SEO is already strong, you’re halfway there. The rest comes down to knowing which optimizations do double duty: improving your rankings while boosting your visibility in generative results.

This article breaks down four technical pillars with the biggest impact on GEO success:

  • Schema markup.
  • Site speed and performance.
  • Content structure.
  • Technical infrastructure.

1. Schema markup: Speaking AI’s language

Schema has long been essential for SEO because it removes ambiguity. Search engines use it to understand content type, identify entities, and trigger rich results.

For GEO, schema clarity is even more important. LLMs favor structured data because it reduces ambiguity and speeds extraction. If your content is marked up clearly, it’s more likely to be selected and cited.

Priority schema types for GEO

Focus on evergreen types that improve visibility:

  • FAQPage: Clearly labeled Q&A helps LLMs match user queries and surface your answers.
  • HowTo: Structured step-by-step processes are easy for AI to extract.
  • Product / Service: Defines pricing, availability, and specifications for accurate inclusion.
  • Article / NewsArticle with Author: Authorship adds a trust signal to your content.
  • Organization / LocalBusiness: Reinforces your identity, entity clarity, and local authority.
  • Review / AggregateRating: Provides social proof that AI engines use as quality signals.
  • VideoObject / ImageObject: Makes your multimedia easier for AI to find and feature.
  • BreadcrumbList: Improves context and page hierarchy mapping.

Implementation best practices

  • Use JSON-LD format (Google’s recommended approach).
  • Test rigorously with Google’s Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator.
  • Keep markup synced with your visible content – outdated schema erodes trust.
  • Don’t overdo it: mark up only what helps explain the content.

Bottom line: Schema improves your chances of being cited in AI answers, keeping competitors out of the box.

2. Site speed and performance: A (dis)qualifying factor

In SEO, speed has been a Google ranking factor since 2010. In GEO, speed is often a qualifier.

Generative engines pull from billions of pages. If yours is slow or unstable, they can skip it in favor of faster, more reliable sources.

Quick performance wins

  • Compress images; use WebP or AVIF; enable lazy loading.
  • Eliminate render-blocking CSS and JavaScript.
  • Target a server response time (TTFB) under 200ms.
  • Use a CDN to reduce latency.

Bottom line: Speed could be a tiebreaker between equally relevant sources. Faster pages have higher odds of inclusion in AI-generated answers – and they convert better once users click through.

3. Content structure: Making information machine-readable

LLMs rely on clarity. The easier it is for machines to parse and organize your content, the more likely it is to appear in AI-generated results.

Structural essentials

  • Logical URLs: Short, descriptive paths (e.g., /services/website-design/) clarify hierarchy.
  • Internal linking: Use bidirectional linking – pillar pages to subpages and vice versa – to reinforce topical authority.
  • Header tags (H1–H6): Follow a logical hierarchy and avoid skipping levels.
  • Structured elements: Tables, lists, and ordered steps are easier for LLMs to extract than long paragraphs.

Bottom line: Well-structured content signals topical authority, giving your site a better chance of being included in comprehensive AI answers.

4. Technical infrastructure: Ensuring discovery and trust

Even the best schema, structure, and speed won’t matter if LLMs can’t access or trust your content. Your technical infrastructure underpins GEO.

Key considerations

  • Crawlability: Ensure your important pages are accessible to Googlebot and Bingbot, since many LLMs rely on those indexes.
  • Freshness signals: Use accurate publication/modification dates, XML sitemaps with <lastmod>, and visible update notes.
  • Security: HTTPS, valid SSL, and security headers (CSP, X-Content-Type-Options, X-Frame-Options) establish trust.
  • JavaScript rendering: Don’t hide core content behind heavy client-side rendering. Use server-side rendering for anything essential.

Bottom line: If search or generative engines can’t crawl, verify freshness, or trust your site, your content won’t be considered – no matter how authoritative it is.

Building for search and AI success

The technical elements that drive GEO success aren’t new. They build on SEO fundamentals you already know:

  • Schema.
  • Performance.
  • Structure.
  • Infrastructure.

But in the AI era, these aren’t just best practices – they’re the deciding factors between being featured and being forgotten.

Getting this right will preserve your search visibility and put your content at the center of AI-driven answers.

Read more at Read More

Want to win at local SEO? Focus on reviews and customer sentiment

Local SEO reviews sentiment

Search is changing fast. This year, we’ve seen more instances of search engine results sharing space with AI-powered features that are changing how people find information.

Along with the changes to how search engines display information, we’re also seeing users explore new methods to search for information. Google AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity – there are many large language models (LLMs) capturing users’ attention, providing new ways for users online to discover and make decisions about your brand. 

Customer sentiment, shown through reviews and ratings, is becoming a key part of both local and branded search.

For brands looking to stay ahead, focusing on sentiment, review ratings, and authority signals will be key. These are the items that not only affect rankings but also impact what shows up in search snippets and LLM responses.

LLMs like Google’s AI Mode are pulling together and highlighting customer sentiment within their responses when asked about specific brands or for geo-modified search queries, think “home repair near me”. 

For businesses, paying attention to their review strategy and reputation will be key to standing apart in local results, overall organic visibility, and showing up favorably in AI responses. However, even with these changes, many of the tried-and-true best practices that have helped brands succeed in local search in the past still apply. 

Searches with local intent: Google’s AI Mode

When it comes to local search, “near me” queries continue to be highly important. In traditional search, these typically trigger a Local Pack followed by organic blue links.

In Google’s AI Mode, the experience is similar. Users are shown a list of local businesses, often with short descriptions, star ratings, and review summaries.

The links cited are usually citation platforms like Yelp or TripAdvisor, business websites, or publications, and it’s common to find Google Business Profile place cards. Clicking these opens the familiar Google Business Profile interface, keeping users within the Google ecosystem.

Running store near me Google AI Mode

What does this mean for businesses aiming to capture visibility in AI-driven local search results? Many of the foundations of local SEO still apply.

  • NAP consistency: Ensure your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are accurate and consistent across all listings.
  • Citations: Maintain listings on trusted third-party sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and local directories to help reinforce credibility.
  • Google Business Profile optimization: Fully complete and regularly update your profile with accurate info, photos, business hours, and relevant categories.
  • Reviews: Generate and respond to reviews to build trust and signal relevance to both users and search engines.

Branded search results for local businesses

When searching for a local business using branded terms in AI Mode, it’s common to see many of the same elements and data sources as traditional search. These business overviews often include a description of the company, the products or services offered, and customer sentiment.

Often, the customer sentiment section summarizes review data pulled from multiple sources, such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, industry-specific sites such as Apartments.com, and Google Business Profile.

Rachel's Ginger Beer Google AI Mode reviews

What’s unique about AI Mode is that it provides unbiased summaries of pros and cons about a business based directly on available customer reviews, which can come directly from Google Business Profile or be a mixed of review data from trusted online sources. These clear overviews include overall sentiment and often link to the business profiles.

AI Mode isn’t the first time Google has experimented with review summaries.

Some industries, like restaurants, already have “Review Summaries” in organic search results. These generative AI summaries highlight Google Business Profile review data, usually with a more positive tone, alongside the star rating and list of reviews.

Taziki's Mediterranean Cafe Google review summaries

The importance of reviews

Reviews shape how your brand appears online, whether they are displayed front and center on your Google Business Profile or surfaced as snippets in responses from LLMs. Google’s AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity all returned some information or mention of customer reviews when searching for local businesses, especially for branded queries. 

Von Elrod's Beer Garden Perplexity reviews

These responses emphasize how both positive and negative offline experiences can influence what is said about your brand online and the importance of customer perception, especially when those experiences get highlighted for customers who may be discovering your brand for the first time. 

West46 reviews and vibe ChatGPT

Businesses need to pay attention to reviews, if not across all platforms, then at least on Google Business Profile. Review data is being pulled into AI-driven results and also plays a role in local search visibility.

Google is placing more emphasis on reviews. In July, Google updated its documentation on local search rankings, with the most notable change found in the Prominence section:

“Prominence means how well-known a business is. Prominent places are more likely to show up in search results. This factor’s also based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. More reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking.”

How can businesses adapt?

By following the tactics local businesses should already be doing to succeed in local search:

  •  Focus on generating new, recent reviews.
  •  Respond to both positive and negative reviews.
  •  Read reviews to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your business. Seeing a trend in negative reviews? That could indicate it’s time to make some changes and address those weaknesses.
  • Monitor brand mentions not just for backlinks but also to understand what people are saying about your business online, including community forums, social media platforms, and online publications.

In addition to traditional review sites, platforms like Reddit, TikTok, and Quora are showing up more frequently in branded and local search results. These conversations are also being picked up and summarized in tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT. That means the things people are saying about your business in comment threads or short-form videos can influence how your brand is being represented across both organic and AI-powered results.

What else can be done:

  • Look closely at how your business is perceived online and do the same for your competitors.
  • Compare your review count and average star rating to those of businesses showing up alongside you in the Local Pack. How does your business stack up?
  • Check how AI tools like LLMs or Google’s AI Mode describe your competitors during branded searches and identify where they source that information.
  • Try asking AI tools to compare your business and a competitor. The way these tools summarize differences can give insight into strengths, weaknesses, and areas where you may need to improve to stay competitive in the market.

LLM data sources

LLMs pull from a range of online sources to build summaries about businesses. For local and branded search queries, much of the information they use closely mirrors what shows up in traditional organic search results. This includes data from:

  • Google Business Profiles.
  • Third-party review sites.
  • Official business websites.
  • Wikipedia.
  • Online directories and aggregators.
  • News articles.
  • Public conversations on forums or social media.

LLMs don’t use the same ranking algorithm as Google Search, but they rely on much of the same publicly available information.

Why this matters:

  • The efforts businesses make to improve local SEO, such as maintaining accurate listings, collecting reviews, and building authority, also help shape how their brand is represented in AI-generated search results.
  • Reinforces the importance of managing your presence across multiple platforms and staying aware of where your brand is mentioned.
  • Highlights trusted third-party sites where your business may be listed but not actively managed. These listings still influence visibility and should not be overlooked.
  • Identifies which platforms are trusted within your specific industry, revealing opportunities to strengthen your presence on niche or vertical-specific sites.

Managing reputation at scale for multi-location businesses

For multi-location and microbrand businesses, managing sentiment at the local level adds another layer of complexity. It is not just about how the overall brand is perceived, but how each location appears in search results. This is especially important for industries like senior living, apartment communities, and healthcare, where customer experience and trust are crucial in decision-making. 

A few negative reviews tied to a single location can shape perception across the board. That is why reputation strategies need to scale while still staying localized. Each location needs a clear plan to monitor feedback, respond to reviews, and build a strong presence in both traditional and AI-powered search results.

Core local SEO principles remain

Search is evolving fast, and we can expect more LLMs and AI-powered features to continue to shape how information is delivered to users.

Customer sentiment and brand perception are now more important in shaping how a business appears online, whether it’s in traditional organic search results or another platform.

Why?

Because perception matters, both online and in real life. Tools like Google’s AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT are putting reviews, ratings, and sentiment summaries front and center, making customer feedback more visible than ever. 

Now is the time for brands to take a close look at how they appear in LLMs, understand the feedback being surfaced, and identify areas to improve. Doing this not only helps with visibility in AI-driven search but also strengthens your local market presence.

As part of a broader brand reputation and visibility strategy, it’s essential to regularly monitor how your business is showing up in both traditional and AI-powered search results. That includes checking branded SERP features like AI Overviews, People Also Ask, video carousels, and social content pull-ins. These elements shift often, and staying aware of what’s being surfaced helps inform both SEO and reputation efforts. 

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. To keep up with the changing search landscape, you just need to focus your efforts in the right direction.

Read more at Read More

How to Optimize Your Ecommerce Store for AI Search (7 Steps)

More of your customers are using AI to research products before they buy. Are you prepared?

To put this into perspective:

Last year, you might’ve searched “best bed sheets” on Google and scrolled through a few links or a Shopping ad.

Google SERP – Best bed sheets

This year, you’re asking ChatGPT:

“I sleep hot and have sensitive skin. Can you recommend some breathable bed sheets that won’t irritate me?”

Totally different input. Totally different rules for showing up.

AI Search still cares about the fundamentals — content, crawlability, internal links, and high-quality backlinks. But now, your visibility is influenced by more than just your website.

AI models reflect the full picture:

  • What people say about your brand
  • Where you’re mentioned
  • How your product is reviewed

It’s not just keyword targeting — it’s relevance engineering.

Shoutout to Mike King @ iPullRank for coining this term.

That’s where AI Search Optimization comes in.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to:

  • Make your product pages visible and understandable to LLMs
  • Structure your data with schema and product feeds
  • Submit your catalog to AI search platforms
  • Shift from keyword targeting to prompts and personas
  • Build an AI-friendly brand presence across the web
  • Track your visibility in a probabilistic, answer-first world

The future of ecommerce search isn’t about rankings. It’s about being part of the answer. This guide will show you how.

Step 1: Make Your PDPs Crawlable and Renderable

Before you do anything, start here: can bots actually see your product content?

When people started taking AI tools and chatbots seriously in 2022/23, some site owners turned to blocking their crawlers from accessing their site.

But if you block the crawler, it won’t be able to serve your pages in its responses.

Don’t Block AI Crawlers in Your Robots.txt File

Unless you actively took the step to block them, you shouldn’t need to do anything here. But it’s still worth verifying there are no lines in your robots.txt file like:

code icon
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Don’t Serve Important Content Using JavaScript

The other aspect of crawlability to consider is how you’re serving your content.

Because right now, bots from the likes of ChatGPT and Perplexity do not appear to process JavaScript (although Google’s Gemini can). If your content is being loaded dynamically, they’re likely missing it completely.

That includes:

  • Product descriptions
  • Pricing
  • Images
  • Schema markup

If it’s not in the raw HTML, LLMs like these can’t see it. And if they can’t see it, you won’t show up in AI-generated product recommendations.

To make sure you’re not causing crawling issues here, you first need to understand how your ecommerce platform handles JavaScript. Every platform is different:

  • Shopify: Generally fine, but watch out for third-party apps injecting schema or content via JS.
  • WooCommerce: Depends heavily on your theme. Many use plugins that load parts of the page with JS.
  • Custom stacks: If you’re using React, Vue, or similar frameworks, check whether product pages render server-side or after load.

Next, check your PDPs manually. You can do this by right-clicking and selecting “Inspect” in your browser.

Nike – Inspecting page

Then press Command+Shift+P on Mac, or Control+Shift+P on Windows/Linux.

In the Command Menu, start typing “javascript” and then select “Disable JavaScript”:

Inspect – Disable JavaScript

Reload the page, and you’ll see how it looks without JavaScript enabled — in other words, how LLMs like ChatGPT see the page:

Nike page without JavaScript enabled

In the Nike example above, the LLM would still see key info like the product title, description, and price.

But in the example below…

Nothing appears with JavaScript disabled

…it would see nothing.

You can see on the right that there’s still page code loading. But nothing is actually displayed to the user with JavaScript disabled. Meaning AI tools wouldn’t be able to pull any info from this page.

If you are using apps or components that rely on JavaScript to display key content, talk to your dev team about server-side rendering (SSR) or prerendering. The goal is to ensure all critical product info is delivered in the first HTML response.

Step 2: Add Structured Schema Markup

Once your product pages are crawlable, the next step is making them understandable.

Structured data — specifically Schema.org markup in JSON-LD format — helps systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google understand what your product is, how much it costs, whether it’s in stock, and more.

In the world of SEO, we’ve long used schema markup to improve how our pages appear in traditional search results.

Here’s an example of a traditional Google results enhanced with schema markup, appearing as a rich snippets:

Review rich snippet

But for LLM visibility, schema helps the AI tools understand key details about your products. Which makes it easier for them to pull in your products when they’re making recommendations for users.

How do we know this?

Because Microsoft has told us. The tech giant, a major investor in OpenAI (behind ChatGPT), said:

“[Structured data] makes it easier for search engines not only to index your content, but to surface it accurately and richly in search results, shopping experiences, and AI-driven assistants.”


(Interestingly, Microsoft/Bing recommends combining this with IndexNow — a service that automatically pings search engines when you update your content.)

Plus, using structured data just makes sense — it helps make it easier for complex machines to understand our content. Whether that’s a search engine or an LLM, providing more context is generally always going to be a good idea.

Here’s how to use structured data to improve your ecommerce store’s LLM visibility:

Focus on Product Pages First

While there’s value in marking up other templates (like category pages, blog posts, or FAQs), your product pages are where it counts most.

This is the data that LLMs and search engines will use to:

  • Associate your product with relevant categories and attributes
  • Match your offering to long-tail purchase prompts
  • Feed structured knowledge into their product and shopping systems

Here are the fields to include:

  • @type: Product
  • GTIN, SKU, MPN
  • Brand
  • Description
  • Offer block (price, currency, availability, URL)
  • Review/rating info if available

Use your schema to reflect reality, not just fill fields. But also add as much context as you can.

If your product is eco-friendly, US-made, sweatproof — encode it. The better your markup, the more context LLMs have to surface your product in nuanced prompts.

Validate Your Schema and Confirm It’s Visible

Check your schema is valid with tools like:

Nike Schema Validator Result

Make sure the schema is present in the raw HTML — not loaded with JavaScript.

Bonus: Extend to Reviews, FAQs, HowTo

Once your product markup is solid, consider adding:

  • Review and AggregateRating blocks
  • FAQPage markup for your PDPs or Help Center
  • HowTo schema for tutorial content or sharing post-purchase use cases

These all help build context around your product and can influence how LLMs present or recommend it.

Once you’ve marked up your product pages, the next step is scaling an effective structure across your entire catalog. That’s where a high-quality product feed comes in.

Step 3: Build a High-Quality Product Feed

Structured feeds have been essential for Google Shopping, Meta Advantage+, and TikTok Shop for a while.

And now, they’re becoming equally important for AI-powered discovery. Especially as platforms like Perplexity and OpenAI build out product recommendation systems.

Think of your feed as the dataset LLMs will eventually pull from when answering questions like this:

ChatGPT – Bed sheets – Verified reviews

Perplexity has launched a Merchant Program accepting feed uploads, called the Perplexity Merchant Program. This lets ecommerce sellers have even more control over how their products can appear in AI responses.

Plus, OpenAI is quietly testing ways to let store owners upload feeds to improve their AI responses for product recommendations.

These feeds will likely drive future AI shopping experiences across chat, search, and even voice interfaces.

So how do you set your product feeds up in an LLM-friendly way?

What to Include

To optimize your product feeds for AI, start with the essentials:

  • Product title
  • Description
  • Price
  • Availability
  • Product URL
  • GTIN or MPN + Brand
  • Image URL

Note: Tools like ChatGPT may still generate their own versions of some of these (like titles). But it’ll still typically use information from places like your product feeds to inform its responses.


After you’ve added the basics, layer in high-value fields like:

  • Category or taxonomy
  • Color, material, and size variants
  • Shipping cost and speed
  • Review count and star rating
  • Custom labels for campaigns or segmentation

Use the same language your customers use.

This means writing product information the way your customers actually talk and search, not how your internal teams or suppliers describe things. For example:

Instead of:

“Athletic footwear with moisture-wicking synthetic upper”

Write:

“Running shoes that keep your feet dry”

How do you find out how they talk?

Look at your customer reviews, support tickets, and search queries that already drive traffic to your store.

For example, they might search for “cozy sweater” not “knitted pullover.” This can inform your title and description choices.

How to Submit Product Feeds to LLMs

Here’s how to submit your product feeds for three of the biggest AI interfaces.

Perplexity:

In 2024, Perplexity launched their Merchant Program. This fuels the platform’s shopping experience for Pro users. Your products may appear in carousel-style answers and shopping-focused prompts, and shoppers can buy without leaving Perplexity.

You can find out more about the program and sign up here.

OpenAI (ChatGPT):

OpenAI is piloting product discovery via ChatGPT’s “Search + Product Discovery” initiative. They’re exploring using uploaded feeds to power future buying experiences inside ChatGP.

Fill out this interest form to apply.

Google Merchant Center (AI Mode and Gemini):

Google’s Merchant Center feeds power Shopping Ads, organic Shopping listings, and likely influence how Google’s AI systems interpret and surface your products in AI Mode and AI Overviews.

Step 4: Monitor LLM Crawlers

Once you’ve put all the steps in place to make your ecommerce store crawlable by LLMs, the next step is to make sure they’re actually accessing your content and product pages.

Here’s how to do that:

Set Up Bot Monitoring

Use server logs or your CDN (like Cloudflare, Fastly, or Akamai) to track requests from:

  • GPTBot: This user agent is used by OpenAI to crawl web content that may be used in training their generative AI foundation models.
  • OAI-SearchBot: Used by OpenAI to link to and surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features.
  • PerplexityBot: Identifies Perplexity’s AI search crawler when it accesses websites.
  • Google uses various Googlebot user agents to crawl the web, depending on the type of content being crawled (e.g., desktop, mobile, images). You can find a detailed list of common Googlebot user agent strings and their purposes in resources from Google for Developers.

Cloudflare – AI audit – Samrhea

For each of these bots, track:

  • Which pages they’re crawling (PDPs, collection pages, sitemap, feed)
  • How often they come back
  • How crawl patterns evolve over time

This helps confirm they’re discovering your content and gives you a baseline to measure progress.

Step 5: Shift from Keyword Lists to Prompts and Personas

Keyword research is still important. But you also need to think about how your customers are likely to prompt AI tools when looking for products like yours.

LLMs answer questions, interpret context, and make recommendations based on how people naturally speak.

That means you need to rethink how you optimize for product discovery. Not by keywords alone, but by personas, use cases, and prompt formats.

Start With What You Know

Your best-performing SEO and paid search keywords are still the foundation. They tell you:

  • Which products and categories convert
  • How people describe their intent in short-form searches
  • Which attributes drive action (e.g., “cooling sheets,” “queen size,” “organic cotton”)

Use these to anchor your prompt strategy — but expand outward.

Think in Prompts, Not Just Queries

As people become more savvy with how AI tools work, more and more shoppers are going beyond just typing in “best bed sheets.” They’re asking:

Medium-length prompts:

  • “Best cooling sheets for hot sleepers”
  • “Softest bed sheets under $100”
  • “What kind of sheets stay on the bed all night?”

Longer, context-rich prompts:

  • “I’m a side sleeper who gets hot at night. What bed sheets will stay cool and not cling to my skin?”
  • “Looking for breathable, hypoallergenic sheets that work well in humid climates”
  • “I have sensitive skin and eczema. What’s a good sheet material that won’t irritate me?”

Your goal is to build context around your products that lines up with this kind of language and framing.

Note: You can’t predict exactly what your customers will ask, and there are infinite ways they can do it. But thinking about prompts — not just keywords — will put you in a good place to be able to optimize your ecommerce pages for LLMs.


Map Your Catalog to Prompt-Based Use Cases

Think in layers:

  • By need: cooling, breathable, wrinkle-resistant, organic
  • By persona: hot sleeper, allergy sufferer, luxury buyer, college student
  • By situation: new apartment, guest bedroom, summer refresh, wedding registry
  • By problem: sheets come loose, feel scratchy, trap heat, shrink in the wash

This is how you start to think of your items like answers and solutions, not just products.

Use These Prompts to Guide Content and Merchandising

Let this prompt structure inform your:

  • Product page copy and comparison points
  • Blog posts and videos
  • Social media posts
  • FAQs and Help Center content
  • Category names and filters
  • Product feed descriptions and attributes

LLMs can pull from all of it — so make sure you’re using the kind of language your real customers use everywhere.

Step 6: Seed Your Brand Across the Web

Even if your site is crawlable, your schema is perfect, and your feed is super optimized — LLMs still learn about your brand based on what people are saying about you elsewhere.

They’re trained on massive web-scale datasets, so third-party content — like reviews, Reddit mentions, YouTube transcripts, forums, blog posts — can carry as much (or more) weight than your owned channels.

If you want to show up in AI answers, your brand needs to already exist in the wider conversation.

Where You Want to Show Up

AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude all lean on third-party review sites and forums in their answers to brand and product-related queries.

ChatGPT – Bed sheets – Forum citations

These are the places you’ll want to show up in order to be included in those answers:

  • Review sites: Trustpilot, Amazon, Google Reviews, BBB, niche review sites
  • Reddit, Quora, & niche forums: Participate in threads and subtly seed your product category (without being spammy)
  • YouTube: Appear in titles, transcripts, and product comparisons — even if you’re not the creator (consider partnering with creators to do this)
  • Affiliate content: Get included in roundups, listicles, and side-by-side comparisons

Showing up in these places is half the battle. The other component is how you show up.

Ideally, you’ll want to be mentioned alongside competitors (“like Brooklinen but…”). And in the right, relevant context (“these are some of the best cooling sheets for eczema”).

A lot of this is going to be completely out of your control (especially on platforms like Reddit). But good marketing practices can make it more likely that people will naturally talk about your brand in the way you want them to.

This Is Just Good Marketing

Gaining LLM visibility is a byproduct of an effective multichannel marketing strategy.

If you’re running a strong content program, building brand awareness, and actively participating in your category — you’re already seeding relevance.

What’s new is the urgency: LLMs are already using these signals to decide which brands deserve to be recommended.

Related: See our LLM Seeding Playbook for tactics, templates, and outreach strategies.


Step 7: Track Your AI Search Visibility

In traditional SEO, visibility was deterministic: rank #1 for a keyword, get X% of clicks.

That model is breaking.

AI-powered discovery works differently. Your brand might appear in one version of a response, but not the next.

Whether your ecommerce store is included depends on how the user phrases their prompt, how much brand recognition you have, and how often you’re referenced across the web.

So, your measurement strategy needs to adapt.

What to Track

Start by building a prompt library — real questions your customers might ask:

  • Organize prompts by topic (e.g., cooling sheets, organic materials, luxury bedding)
  • Group them by persona (e.g., hot sleepers, allergy sufferers, budget-conscious buyers)
  • Then choose a tool to test visibility: like Semrush AI SEO Toolkit, Peec.AI, or Profound

Here’s how it looks in Semrush’s AI SEO Toolkit:

Semrush AI Toolkit – Questions

For each prompt, ask:

  • Does your brand show up?
  • If not, who does?
  • What sources are the tools citing?
  • What kind of language are the tools using?

Over time, this gives you a clearer picture of how visible your brand is across different use cases.

LLM Optimization Is Still New, But It’s Gaining Traction Fast

AI-driven search is already reshaping how people discover products. The shift is subtle now, but it won’t stay that way for long.

What used to be a clear SEO vs. paid search strategy is now blending into a broader question:

When someone asks a smart machine what to buy… will it know you exist?

This guide gave you a playbook to start answering that question:

  • Clean up your technical foundation (crawlability, schema, product feeds)
  • Rethink your discovery strategy around prompts and personas
  • Show up across the web in ways that reinforce what makes your brand unique

It’s a lot. But the good news?

If you’ve already invested in great products, strong messaging, and a multi-channel strategy, you’re not starting from scratch.

Still need help nailing the fundamentals?

Check out these guides:

The post How to Optimize Your Ecommerce Store for AI Search (7 Steps) appeared first on Backlinko.

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5 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress (Tried & Tested)

You don’t need an SEO plugin to help your website rank in Google.

In fact, you can do more harm than good if you don’t know what you’re doing with them.

But:

They can make optimizing your website a whole lot easier if you do use them correctly.

We’re talking:

  • Faster page speeds
  • Better optimized content
  • Fewer technical SEO issues

All without touching any code.

So how do you choose which plugin to use? Can you use more than one?

And the big one — should you use Yoast or Rank Math?

You’ll get the answers to these burning questions below.

But first, here’s the tl;dr on the best SEO plugins for WordPress:

Best for Pricing
Rank Math Beginners looking for an all-in-one solution Free version available; Pro plans start at $7.99/month, billed annually
Yoast SEO Anyone in need of guided SEO setup and writing support Free version available; Premium starts at $99/year
WP Rocket Improving site speed and Core Web Vitals $59/year for one site
The SEO Framework Handling essentials with minimalist features Free; paid versions for more sites from $7/month billed annually
Semrush SEO Writing Assistant Writing better SEO content Free; increased usage with a Semrush subscription

Note: We’ve stuck with plugins that can directly improve your SEO. You won’t see analytics plugins like Monster Insights or external keyword generators on this list. These are useful tools in their own right — but they’re not true SEO plugins.


1. Rank Math

Best all-in-one SEO plugin for new WordPress sites

Pricing: Free version available; Pro plans start at $7.99/month billed annually

Rank Math SEO – Dashboard

Rank Math has pretty much everything you need in an SEO plugin. If you’re new to SEO, it’ll handle all the important stuff for you, including:

  • Content optimization
  • Image SEO
  • Internal and external linking
  • Local SEO
  • Schema markup
  • Sitemaps
  • Redirects

And way more.

It’s actually the go-to recommendation from our own Head of SEO, Leigh McKenzie:

“Rank Math is my no. 1 choice across the board. For any site starting from scratch, I’d always recommend Rank Math first.”


Let’s go through some of the features behind his recommendation:

Manage Metadata and Social Previews

Starting with the basics, Rank Math lets you manage your page’s SEO title, meta description, and how it appears on social media — right within the post editor:

Rank Math SEO – TTT – Preview Snippet Editor

It also lets you preview what the post will look like when you share it on Facebook and X/Twitter:

Rank Math SEO – TTT – Preview Snippet Editor – Social

This gives you more control over how your content looks in SERPs and social feeds.

It’s a pretty rudimentary feature, and hardly one that separates it from the likes of Yoast below when taken in isolation.

But how your social content looks can have a big impact on the engagement your posts get — and how many people click through to read your content. So it’s a useful feature for those looking to share their content beyond their blog.

Get SEO Suggestions as You Write

Rank Math also gives you SEO guidance as you’re creating your content in the WordPress editor. Like having your own SEO assistant you can call on as you write.

Rank Math SEO – SEO Assistant

It’ll highlight things like missing focus keywords in your meta description, intro, and throughout your content.

But honestly? I never use this feature.

So why am I calling it out here?

Because when you’re just starting out creating SEO content, it’s actually super helpful for keeping you on track.

Sure, once you’re familiar with the basics of content optimization, you’ll do all of this naturally. But as a beginner, this gentle guidance can help you learn faster (and create better optimized content in the process).

Plus, you can click “Fix with AI” to generate a suggestion and save time on the small changes.

Rank Math SEO – Content AI – Snippet Editor

It’s not going to be perfect. But for a one-click, two-second job?

I’ll happily use this, because it speeds up optimization.

Plus, you can tweak or regenerate the output anyway, so it’s useful as a starting point.

Broken Links and Redirects

Rank Math flags broken links on your site using its built-in 404 Monitor.

Rank Math SEO – 404 Monitor

You can then set up a redirect right from the dashboard:

Rank Math SEO – Redirect from dashboard

This feature keeps your internal links working. It ensures you’re passing authority between your pages and that you’re offering a good user experience.

It also reduces plugin bloat as you don’t need a separate plugin to handle broken links.

The fact the free version of the plugin comes with built-in redirection capabilities is a massive win in my book.

I’ve personally leaned on this particular part of the plugin heavily multiple times.

Firstly, it’s great for just quickly setting up redirects when you change the URL of a post (it even does this automatically).

Rank Math SEO – SEO Notice

But you can also set it up to move entire categories of posts or pages through the filters.

Just choose “contains” and you’ll be able to move all your content from /old-path/page to /new-path/page without your users even noticing — and without any hassle on your end.

Rank Math SEO – Redirect contains

I don’t see enough people praising Rank Math for the redirect functionality. But honestly it’s a lifesaver.

Downsides But Not Dealbreakers

Rank Math clearly has a lot of features, which is great. But it can also feel overwhelming at first. That’s just the nature of any “all-in-one” style plugin.

However, once you know where things are and what you need, it’s fairly easy to navigate.

Also, on the content improvement side of things, readability feedback is pretty limited. It checks basic things like paragraph length and image use. But it won’t help you improve sentence structure or tone.

Rank Math SEO – Title & Content readabillity

(If you need more focus on that, check out the fifth plugin on this list.)

But overall, these drawbacks are pretty minor. Rank Math is still our number one recommendation if you need an SEO plugin.

2. Yoast SEO

Best for beginners who want step-by-step SEO guidance inside WordPress

Pricing: Free version available; Premium starts at $99/year

Yoast SEO – Dashboard

Yoast SEO is probably the first plugin you came across when you started looking into WordPress SEO. And for good reason — it’s installed on 10+ million sites and has around 26K five-star reviews.

It’s been around for so long and has such a clear purpose that its WordPress plugin directory URL path is literally just “/wordpress-seo/”:

Wordpress Plugin Directory URL

It’s the second of the “big two” WordPress SEO plugins alongside RankMath, and it’s worth addressing why we put it second before we get into the details of the plugin itself.

In summary: We usually recommend Rank Math for a first-time WordPress site owner. It’s packed with features, and its free version has the edge over Yoast in a few areas. These include redirects, multiple focus keywords per post, and more extensive schema markup options.

But Yoast is pretty evenly matched in a lot of ways. Especially if you opt for the paid version.

In fact, this is the specific SEO plugin we use for Backlinko.

Yoast SEO – Ste features

My personal recommendation is to try them both (separately) and see which one works best for you.

Note: Don’t use them both at the same time, as running multiple all-in-one SEO plugins on the same site can lead to compatibility issues.


Okay, now let’s go through what I like most about the Yoast SEO plugin:

Optimize Search and Social Previews

Like Rank Math, Yoast helps you optimize how your content appears both in search results and on social media.

You can easily update your SEO title, meta description, and URL slug for every page or post:

Yoast SEO – Optimize your content

You also get a live preview of how your content will appear in Google search results and on socials.

It’s very similar to Rank Math in this respect. But I wanted to call it out here anyway as it’s some fairly fundamental functionality for a WordPress SEO plugin.

Get Real-Time SEO and Readability Feedback

Yoast analyzes your SEO as you write, using a simple green/orange/red traffic light system.

Green means you’re following best practices, while orange suggests there’s room for improvement. Red highlights critical issues you should prioritize.

Yoast SEO – SEO Analysis section

Each suggestion is actionable, helping you easily optimize your pages, even if you’re new to SEO.

Yoast also gives you a detailed breakdown of your content’s readability.

You’ll see checks for things like passive voice, sentence length, and consecutive sentence starters. In this respect, it does offer a bit more than Rank Math.

Yoast SEO – Readability Analysis section

My advice: Don’t chase all the green lights thinking it’ll help you rank. Content quality and value for the reader matter far more than hitting a certain percentage or score.

However, Yoast’s feedback does help you spot common issues and make your writing clearer for both users and search engines.

Like I said in the Rank Math section, I don’t personally use these features. But beginner me found himself looking to them quite a lot for basic guidance.

Manage XML Sitemaps

Yoast creates a dynamic XML sitemap for your site and updates it as you publish new content.

Here’s what it looks like for Backlinko:

Yoast – Sitemap

This is a basic but very useful feature (Rank Math does this too).

Just make sure to submit your sitemap URL to Google Search Console. This helps Google discover and index your content.

Downsides But Not Dealbreakers

Yoast’s SEO scoring system can feel rigid. For example, you might get flagged for not using your main keyword in the first sentence even if it doesn’t fit there naturally.

And I’ll often see site owners that are new to SEO sticking too closely to these guidelines and creating pretty mediocre content as a result.

But if you treat the feedback as guidance, not strict rules, Yoast can still be a helpful way to catch easy-to-miss issues.

Further reading: Learn more about the plugin with our full Yoast SEO guide.


A word on a few alternatives before I move on:

The all-in-one SEO plugin market is dominated by Yoast and Rank Math. But another big player we can’t forget to mention is aptly named All in One SEO (AISEO).

AISEO – Homepage

It does a lot of the same stuff as the other two, but they just do it better. It’s missing key free features like redirects, and it can get pricey if you want to use it on several sites.

Like I said earlier though, you should try these plugins out for yourself if you’re struggling to choose. The free options are more than enough in most cases, and they’ll give you a taste of what to expect should you want to commit to a paid option.

FYI: I don’t personally pay for any SEO plugins besides WP Rocket (more on that next). But we do use Yoast Premium on Backlinko and Rank Math Pro on Traffic Think Tank.

3. WP Rocket

Best for improving your website speed without needing a developer

Pricing: $59/year for one website, $119/year for three websites

WP Rocket – Dashboard

WP Rocket is probably my favorite of all the plugins on this list, even if it’s not technically the best overall. It’s a performance plugin designed to speed up WordPress websites. That’s all it aims to do, and boy does it succeed.

I run a somewhat well optimized site, and here’s how it looks in PageSpeed Insights without WP Rocket installed:

PageSpeed Insights – Web with no WP Rocket installed

After installing the plugin and turning on the most important features, here’s how it looks:

PageSpeed Insights – Web with installed WP Rocket

Let’s just pause on those numbers for a second:

  • 20 point increase in overall performance score
  • 2.1 second improvement in first contentful paint
  • 30 ms to 0 ms total blocking time
  • 2.8 second improvement in largest contentful paint

Again, it’s a decent baseline to begin with. But WP Rocket improves my site performance in ways I otherwise can’t manage on a site that’s quite heavy on the Elementor elements.

That’s an important point in itself: you 100% can make your site run fast without SEO plugins like WP Rocket.

But you will need to make sacrifices unless you’re an experienced developer (which I am not).

So if you also want to improve your site speed without digging into the code or harming your UX, here’s why you should consider WP Rocket:

Caching Made Simple

WP Rocket makes performance optimization easy. For example, I didn’t have to touch a single setting for the caching features to kick in, and you can clear your cache at the touch of a button:

WP Rocket – Cache option

This is a feature some WordPress hosts and other plugins offer (my own web host does, for example). But I like WP Rocket’s because it’s easy to do within a dashboard that also does so much more.

For a non-developer like me, this kind of out-of-the-box performance boost is extremely useful.

File Optimization

You can also dig into advanced settings to minify your CSS and JavaScript, optimize images and fonts, and connect to a CDN.

WP Rocket – File Optimization

These tweaks can cut load time, reduce file sizes, and can even improve Core Web Vitals. In other words, they can have a major impact on your site speed.

(And as someone with no coding experience, there’s no way I could do any of this without a plugin.)

Now for the second and only other feature on this list that I’ll describe with the phrase “life saver”:

It comes with one-click exclusions for popular tools like Google Analytics, AdSense, and Stripe, along with other WordPress plugins, like Elementor:

WP Rocket – Delay JavaScript execution

That means you’re less likely to break your tracking, ads, payment processing, or UX while optimizing. Which, believe me, is easy (and frustrating) to do.

And you don’t need to dig through documentation to figure out what to exclude.

You can also create custom exclusions, and these are handy if you do know what’s causing issues.

Downsides But Not Dealbreakers

Some layout elements may break if you enable file optimization without adding exclusions. In my case, my Elementor post cards got distorted. But excluding the right files fixed it.

WP Rocket – Verify CSS files

(Finding the right files to exclude took me a lot of trial and error, but your mileage may vary.)

The settings can also feel pretty technical if you’re not a web developer. I had to Google a lot before knowing what to toggle.

However, WP Rocket’s help center docs were solid. And once everything was dialed in, my site’s performance improved significantly. (Again, see the screenshots at the start of this section.)

Free alternative: When I first started playing around with WordPress websites, I used Autoptimize for a lot of the things WP Rocket does.

WP Rocket – Autoptimize Settings

It’s not as extensive when you use the free version, but it’ll get you a meaningful chunk of the way there if site speed is a big concern for you.

Plus, I still run this on a few of my lower priority sites when I just want to tick the main performance boxes.

4. The SEO Framework

Best lightweight, minimalist SEO plugin

Pricing: Free; paid plans start at $7/month (paid yearly)

The SEO Framework – Settings

The SEO Framework is a free and lightweight plugin for WordPress that quietly handles the SEO essentials.

It’s no Rank Math or Yoast, but it will still do a lot of the most important things for you.

This plugin is popular among developers for a reason. It runs fast, doesn’t clutter your dashboard, and avoids the “all-in-one” bloat you get with other SEO plugins.

Here’s what you get with the SEO Framework plugin:

Get Instant SEO Feedback

One of the SEO Framework’s most helpful features is the plugin’s color-coded SEO bar. This gives you a quick visual of how well optimized your pages are.

The SEO Framework – Most helpful features

At first, the labels can look a bit cryptic.

But once you hover over them, they explain what’s working and what needs improvement.

For example, the plugin flagged my meta title as “far too short” and noted that it was automatically generated from the page title. (At least I assume that’s what the “TG” means.)

It explained that the title lacked information, which helped me understand I’d need to customize it to improve its SEO performance.

The SEO Framework – Title lack information

Honestly, I’d maybe like a little more specific detail here. It’s not clear what “more information” it means. But it does make it easy to do a high-level audit of your content optimization without opening each page.

If it flags your title or description, you can open the page editor and tweak the meta fields directly to optimize them:

The SEO Framework – SEO Description

The SEO Framework also shows each page’s indexing status. If a page is indexed, it appears in green. If there’s an indexing issue, it tells you exactly what’s wrong.

In my case, it showed that all my published pages were indexed correctly. And a few unpublished ones were flagged, as expected:

The SEO Framework – Invisible Page

Obviously it’s not going to be as in-depth as Google Search Console. But it’s a useful at-a-glance overview of your overall indexing status.

Automate SEO Title and Meta Description Generation

Once you find titles and meta descriptions to optimize, the SEO Framework automatically generates meta them based on your content.

The SEO Framework – Generated Title

But you can still tweak auto-generated meta elements to add more value as needed.

The SEO Framework – Tweak auto-generated meta elements

That’s it, that’s the feature.

It’s nothing fancy, and it’s not always perfect. But for a lightweight SEO plugin, this is a great timesaver.

You can also control how your page appears on social media. You can even add a custom image for Facebook or X:

The SEO Framework – Social

If you like this functionality of the likes of Yoast and Rank Math but don’t need all the extra features, the SEO Framework plugin could be all you need.

Simple Base Plugin with Room to Expand

The SEO Framework is intentionally minimal to be fast, lightweight, and free of unnecessary extras. That makes it a great choice if you’re looking for something that won’t slow your site down or overwhelm you with options.

And if you ever need additional features, like schema markup, third-party connections, or local SEO support, you can always install them as separate extensions.

The SEO Framework – Extensions

Downsides But Not Dealbreakers

The SEO Framework is lightweight, which means it’s also feature-light. It has the basics, but it won’t cover everything for you.

To get a bit pickier, I noticed that when I try to edit an automatically generated SEO title or meta description, the entire field clears as soon as I click it.

That means I can’t just tweak a few words. I have to retype the whole thing from scratch. It would be a smoother experience if I could simply edit the existing text in place.

But the fact this is such a small and specific issue is testament to just how good the plugin is.

5. Semrush SEO Writing Assistant

Best for optimizing your content for search right inside the WordPress editor

Pricing: Free, but you can optimize more content with an active Semrush subscription

Semrush SEO Writing Assistant

Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant helps you optimize content as you write it inside the WordPress editor. It’s not an all-in-one solution, and is purely content-focused.

It works by pulling recommendations from your target keyword and analyzing your draft in real time for SEO, readability, tone of voice, and originality.

Let’s take a look at my favorite features of the plugin:

Optimize Your Readability

Semrush calls out exactly what you need to fix to improve your content’s readability, including:

  • Sentences that are hard to read
  • Suggestions to use active voice
  • Specific words to swap for simpler alternatives

Semrush SEO Writing Assistant – Optimize readability

This is super useful if you want to make your content easier to understand and more engaging.

Improve Your On-Page SEO

The plugin also provides clear on-page SEO recommendations based on your target keywords.

At the top of the panel, it shows whether you’ve used your main keywords effectively.

When I created the blog post in the example below, I entered two main keywords: “content marketing” and “content marketing for small businesses.”

Since I used both naturally throughout the article, Semrush marked them green:

Semrush SEO Writing Assistant – Marked main keywords

But below that, it suggests semantically related keywords based on content that’s already ranking well for these terms. As you include those terms, they turn green too:

Semrush SEO Writing Assistant – Recommended keywords

This is where the Semrush plugin goes a step further than the likes of Yoast. It leverages Semrush’s data to give you a helpful way to improve your topical depth based on what’s already ranking — which is a key part of building topical authority.

Why does this matter?

Because search engines like Google are good at recognizing when a piece of content truly covers the topic in depth — rather than just using the target keyword a bunch of times.

When you include related terms, you’re showing Google that your content is contextually relevant and comprehensive.

Analyze Your Tone of Voice

Wondering what your content actually sounds like from a reader’s perspective?

The Semrush SEO Writing Assistant shows whether your writing comes across as casual, formal, or somewhere in between. And whether your tone stays consistent throughout the post.

For example, it labeled my draft as “Neutral” with 95% tone consistency:

Semrush SEO Writing Assistant – Readers perspective

That’s a helpful signal that the post flows well without jumping between writing styles.

That said, don’t let the score alone inform your edits. Instead, use it as a signal to evaluate your writing with fresh eyes and ask:

“Does this sound like me/my brand?”

It also pointed out a few phrases that sounded slightly off-brand. It then suggested alternatives to smooth them out:

Semrush SEO Writing Assistant – Suggested alternatives

They’re not always perfect suggestions, but it’s useful if you’re writing for a specific brand voice and want to keep it consistent across all your articles.

Downsides But Not Dealbreakers

The Semrush SEO Writing Assistant is not a comprehensive SEO plugin. It focuses on optimizing content for search engines and doesn’t replace Yoast or Rank Math.

So, it’s best to use it in combination with other SEO plugins.

Note: Try this plugin along with more tools to improve your SEO with a 14-day trial on a Semrush Pro subscription.


Ready to Choose the Right SEO Plugin for Your Website?

The right SEO plugin can massively improve your WordPress website’s performance.

But it’s also important to set clear expectations.

These tools help you optimize. They don’t rank content for you.

To actually improve your visibility in search, you need to publish great content, improve your site’s performance, and cover the basics of SEO.

So, what should you do next?

Start with our complete SEO checklist to make sure your site is fully optimized for search.

The post 5 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress (Tried & Tested) appeared first on Backlinko.

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Branded GEO: How to Control What AI Says About Your Brand

A few months back, one of my clients pinged me on Slack and said:

“We keep hearing on sales calls that ChatGPT says we don’t offer a feature we’ve had for years! How can we fix this?”


Sure enough, when prompted, ChatGPT confidently responded, “No, the platform does not have that feature, but this other competitor does!”.

For obvious reasons, this was worrying for the client.

Not only was ChatGPT spreading misinformation about their product, it was actively pitching an alternative solution.

The source of the misinformation: A single old blog post that hadn’t been updated in two years.

How many potential buyers decided not to book a sales call because of this?

How many had discovered a new competitor instead?

This issue signals a large shift in how bottom-of-funnel product research is done.

Before: Your website was the source of truth.

It was your “always on” salesperson. You kept your homepage and product pages fresh, and that was where buyers did their digging.

Now: Large language models (LLMs) are a product research assistant. A new touchpoint at a critical stage in the buying journey.

They’re the modern day gatekeepers, acting as the layer between you and your target audience, communicating on your behalf.

And their source of info? It’s often sources you’d forgotten even existed.

As marketers, it falls to us to make sure LLMs are communicating the right things in the right way about our products and services.

In this article, I’ll show you the 7-step playbook my team is developing to tackle this challenge — what we’re calling Branded Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

Free resource: For step 6, we’ve created a handy spreadsheet to help you ideate common questions. Download it here.


What is Branded GEO?

Branded GEO is the process of making sure conversational AIs and LLMs give accurate, helpful, and up-to-date answers about your brand. It focuses on branded prompts and queries.

This targets a highly valuable audience segment, including those who are:

  • In the market to buy a solution or service like yours
  • Already know you are a viable option and are exploring your offer

This segment is showing the highest intent — they’re asking questions about your product, and they’re using your brand name in their prompts.

Like branded SEO, branded GEO is easier to influence. It’s more actionable than trying to optimize for broad industry queries. For that reason, it’s a fantastic starting point if you want to explore GEO.

Note: Generative engine optimization is the broader practice of optimizing for AI-powered search systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews. Branded GEO is a specific subset focused on branded queries.


For the following exercise, I’ll use ChatGPT as the LLM and the B2B SaaS product, Airtable, as an example.

Airtable has recently undergone some serious positioning and product pivots, so it illustrates the new challenges of branded GEO.

Let’s start with a quick setup.

Step 1: Set Up Your LLM

Head to ChatGPT and turn on temporary mode. This avoids any personalization skewing your results.

ChatGPT – Temporary Chat

Also turn on the “search” feature — this ensures ChatGPT is accessing information after June 2024 when it was last trained.

This is currently the data we can influence.

Step 2: Enter Your First Branded Prompt

Next, prompt ChatGPT with a simple question: “What is [your brand name]?”.

Here are the results for Airtable:

ChatGPT – What is Airtable

Step 3: Analyze the Response

Pay attention to how ChatGPT describes your product and company.

Is it accurate? Is it how you would describe your company?

Or do things need to change?

With Airtable, we see what must be a frustrating situation playing out.

Airtable pivoted in June 2025, shifting away from their “super powerful spreadsheet” positioning and relaunching as an:

“AI-native app platform, where the magic of vibe coding meets enterprise reliability and the scalability of AI agents”.


That’s quite the change. And ChatGPT hasn’t caught up yet.

Here’s how Airtable positions themselves versus how ChatGPT does:

How Airtable describes themselves How ChatGPT describes Airtable
Website: “Next gen app building platform” “cloud-based, no-code platform”
Website: “Deploy thousands of agents inside your apps” “simplicity of a spreadsheet with the power of a relational database”
Homepage meta title: “AI App Building for Enterprise” “hybrid spreadsheet‑database”
LinkedIn page: “AI-Native App Platform” Common use cases: “Project management”

Luckily, most readers are unlikely to see such a drastic mismatch.

But at the current rate of technological innovation, almost all companies are undergoing continuous reinvention, and so you are likely to find outdated features and positioning.

Step 4: Find the Source of Misinformation

In this step, we start to tackle the misinformation by looking for its source.

We usually find that ChatGPT has sourced its information from:

  • An outdated article
  • A LinkedIn page that hasn’t been updated in three years
  • A landing page that reflects the “old you”
  • A hallucination due to completely missing information on that topic

As a quick example, I was recently living in Melbourne, and ChatGPT picked that up from a LinkedIn post and stated that my agency, Spicy Margarita, was founded in Melbourne. (We’re based in the UK).

Despite my travel plans, I wasn’t keen to be positioned as an Australian company, so I quickly removed that mention of Melbourne, and ChatGPT’s response adapted.


To address the misinformation you find, visit the sources used and look for a match between the language used by ChatGPT and the words on the page.

See that it says you cost $1,000? Find the source that says that and update it. Fixing the issue is often this simple (unless there is hallucination, which we address in the next step).

To operationalize this process, collate all the sources driving misinformation into a spreadsheet and note down:

  • Whether that source should be deleted or updated
  • Specific text that needs to be changed
  • Specific text that needs to be added — for example, if a feature is missing, you can spell it out in the sources

Backlinko – GEO Questions Worksheet

For our Airtable example, we can see that a highly trusted source (Wikipedia) is currently out of date.

ChatGPT – Wikipedia source

If we worked for Airtable, we’d start with the Wikipedia article. They should note this down and edit this page with their new positioning as soon as possible.

As a major, trusted source of internet knowledge, updating Wikipedia is likely to help influence LLMs, but it may not fix the positioning issue in one fell swoop.

Step 5: Publish, Update, or Delete Sources

For smaller brands with a relatively small web footprint, we find this task is more straightforward.

Take your latest positioning, messaging, and features, and make sure they are represented in key sources LLMs are referencing. Ideally, refresh every source that mentions your brand — from social media accounts to on-site and off-site web pages.

Brands with a larger web presence will find this task more challenging.

If, like Airtable, you have outdated articles written about you across 100s of websites you don’t control, outreach may need to be operationalized to update or take down those sources. If you have no luck with that, we’d suggest running a new campaign that seeds LLMs with lots of new sources that contain your up-to-date information.

Given sources like Zapier and Airtable’s own starter guide (pictured below) still have their old positioning, there’s more work to do.

Airtable – Homepage

Here’s the branded GEO adjustment we would make for Wikipedia:

Airtable’s Wikipedia Before Airtable’s Wikipedia After
“Airtable is a spreadsheet-database hybrid, with the features of a database but applied to a spreadsheet. The fields in an Airtable table are similar to cells in a spreadsheet, but have types such as ‘checkbox’, ‘phone number’, and ‘drop-down list’, and can reference file attachments like images.” “As of June 2025, Airtable now operates as an AI-native app platform, enabling users to build, edit, and automate production-ready business apps through natural-language prompts via its AI assistant Omni and embedded Field Agents.”

You may also find that LLMs are hallucinating something entirely. This can’t be fixed by updating or removing a source. This often happens because they didn’t find an answer in any sources.

If LLMs are hallucinating an answer, you’ll want to try to influence the answer by creating a source that answers the question with the correct information.

Start building a content roadmap with new topics to cover, directly answering those key questions your target buyer has.

These can be hosted on your blog or help center, and serve dual purposes: for branded GEO and as helpful sales material.

Step 6: Expand Your Branded Question Prompts

So far, we’ve asked just one question about your brand.

But, prospective customers are likely asking many, many questions that you’ll want to monitor.

Unfortunately, exact data on those questions is still not available.

Prompts are unlike traditional keywords. They’re often longer and more personalized. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t optimize for the less long-tail prompts and hope that bleeds through.

We can make educated guesses at the topics LLM users are asking questions about using six methods:

1. Ask Your Inbound Leads

I ask every inbound lead who found me via ChatGPT what their prompts and journey were. One even pulled the conversation up and read the exact prompt back to me — it said “I want an SEO agency in the B2B space who is staying up-to-date with AI,” and our agency came up.

This kind of insight is gold dust.

It shows you how your audience prompts, what issues they face, and what content and GEO efforts of yours are already working.

A similar technique is to look in sales insights platforms like Gong for mentions of ChatGPT and to encourage your sales team to ask the question for you.

2. Start With Common Questions

Begin with general questions that people ask about brands. Then, tailor those questions to fit your specific situation.

We’ve made a spreadsheet template to help you find the questions people ask AI about your brand.

Backlinko – GEO Questions Worksheet – Source Tracking

3. Use a Keyword Research Tool

Head to your keyword research tool of choice and enter your brand name.

In Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool, you can filter on “Questions” to pull a full list of the questions people are asking about your brand.

Keyword Magic Tool – Airtable – Questions

Find questions that someone considering your product might ask.

For example, these are a few I’d select for the Airtable before their pivot. Each question factors into the purchase decision.

 
Questions
is airtable free​
how much does airtable cost​
how much does airtable enterprise cost​
is airtable only for apple​
is airtable a crm​
does airtable have a desktop app​
can airtable send emails​
does airtable integrate with outlook​
can airtable be integrated into wordpress
can airtable be integrated with shopify​
does airtable have an api​

4. Use Google Autocomplete

Another helpful tool for finding audience questions is Google Autocomplete.

Google Search Suggest – Is Airtable b

You’ll find autocomplete is a part of normal Google Search. It anticipates and suggests search queries as you type, making predictions based on popular searches, your location, and your search history (so do this in incognito mode).

Enter these queries to see what people are asking:

  • Is [brand name]
  • How [brand name]
  • Does [brand name]
  • Where [brand name]
  • When [brand name]
  • What [brand name]

You can get more suggestions by adding each letter of the alphabet afterward, too. Like this:

Google Search Suggest – Is Airtable b

To speed things up, I recommend taking screenshots of each autocomplete and uploading them all to ChatGPT for extraction and grouping.

5. Use ChatGPT Autocomplete

If you’re lucky enough to be represented in ChatGPT autocomplete already (at the time of writing, only very large brands are), this is also a place to dig into.

ChatGPT – Search suggestion – Does Apple

6. Talk to Your Sales and Support Teams

When we do this exercise with clients, we run a Q&A session with both the sales team and customer support teams.

This first-party insight is invaluable for predicting the questions your target audience has.

Here are six top questions from our client questionnaire:

  • What common questions about your product do you get from prospects on sales calls?
  • What do prospects misunderstand or get wrong before speaking to you?
  • What common objections about your brand do you get from prospects?
  • Do prospects ever mention ChatGPT and what they found there?
  • What questions do people typically ask in your website chat about [brand name]?
  • What usually triggers prospects to book a call or sign up for [brand name] now?

Step 7: Repeat

Now you’ve gathered your questions, it’s time to see how LLMs answer them and fix up the answers.

To do this, repeat steps 1-5.

Tracking the Impact of Branded GEO Work

The impact of branded GEO is twofold:

  1. Relief: From knowing you’re being accurately represented by LLMs.
  2. Additional Conversions: From removing inaccuracies and misinformation, adequately filling content gaps in your lower sales funnel, and better informing buyers before they join sales calls.

To track the impact of this exercise, we recommend:

  1. Monitoring LLM output: Take your list of questions and compare the before and after. Monitor those regularly to confirm continued accuracy.
  2. Track conversion metrics: Compare key conversion rates (sign-ups, demo requests, sales) before and after your LLM content improvements. I suggest you add a “Where did you hear about us?” to your sales booking forms to closely monitor leads that started in LLMs.
  3. Sales team feedback: With the example in the introduction of this article, the sales team had been facing misinformation issues. If you’ve faced a similar issue, stay in close contact with them so get a pulse check on the impact.

The post Branded GEO: How to Control What AI Says About Your Brand appeared first on Backlinko.

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The Future of ASO: Adapting to Intelligent Discovery

The rules of app store optimization (ASO) are changing. What was once a tactical discipline focused on rankings and keywords is rapidly evolving into a strategic lever for user acquisition, brand visibility, and sustained app growth. With advancements in AI, shifts in search behavior, and the rise of hyper-personalized discovery, ASO is entering a new era, one that is contextual, intelligent, and continuously adaptive.

In this article, we explore the forces shaping the future of ASO, from AI-driven metadata and personalized search to voice discovery and predictive app visibility. If you’re looking to stay competitive in an increasingly saturated app landscape, this is what you need to know next.

Key Takeaways

  • ASO is shifting from tactical to strategic. It’s no longer just about keyword stuffing or climbing the rankings. The future is intelligent, personalized, and performance-driven.
  • AI is rewriting how metadata works. Expect real-time, AI-powered updates that align with shifting user behavior, not quarterly refreshes based on guesswork.
  • Search is getting personal. Two users can type the same keyword and see different results. Your listings need to adapt to individual intent, not the average user.
  • Customized Product Pages (CPPs) are just the beginning. Soon, app store experiences will be dynamic, predictive, and unique to each user journey.
  • Voice and ambient discovery are rising. People are finding apps through voice assistants and predictive surfaces, not just typed search queries.
  • App Intents will drive next-gen visibility. Apps need to signal what they do, for whom, and when—so platforms can surface them at just the right moment.
  • Success depends on adaptability. ASO teams that test fast, personalize creatively, and embrace AI will outperform those still chasing static rankings.

Where App Discovery is Heading Next

App Store Optimization is no longer just about rankings. As mobile ecosystems evolve and user expectations shift, the future of ASO will be defined by personalisation, predictive relevance, and deeper integration with emerging technologies. 

We are entering an era where search is increasingly contextual, discovery is increasingly intelligent, and store listings behave more like adaptive marketing assets than static storefronts. 

This section explores the trends shaping the future of ASO. From AI-powered metadata and personalized search to voice discovery and App Intents, we will unpack what marketers need to prepare for now, and where the next growth opportunities lie. 

AI-Powered Metadata: From Static Copy to Intelligent, Performance-Driven Content

As AI becomes more embedded in the app ecosystem, metadata is evolving from something manually updated every quarter to a fluid, data-informed asset that adapts to audience trends, behaviour, and market shifts. 

Instead of relying solely on guesswork and human intuition, AI is enabling metadata to be: 

  • Continuously optimized based on live performance signals 
  • Automatically localised for language, phrasing, and cultural nuance 
  • Tailored dynamically for different cohorts and user segments 
AI-generated reviews on the App Store.

What This Means For Marketers

Metadata is no longer a static exercise in copywriting. AI allows marketers to test, learn, and iterate faster than ever before. With platforms like Apple and Google increasingly rewarding contextual relevance and behavioral alignment, brands will need to adopt: 

  • AI-assisted keyword selection that reflects shifting user intent 
  • Predictive copywriting that forecasts what combinations are likely to convert 
  • Automated content scoring to prioritise which changes to make first 

Strategic Implication

In the future of ASO, teams may move from monthly metadata refreshes to near-continuous optimization. Success will depend not just on creativity, but on how well marketers collaborate with AI tools to generate, score, and deploy high-performing content at scale. 

AI will not replace ASO specialists, but it will raise the bar for relevance, speed, and strategic experimentation. 

Personalized Search: The Shift From Relevance For All to Relevance For Me

In 2025, search is no longer a one-size-fits-all experience. Platforms are increasingly using on-device signals and behavioral patterns to tailor search results to individual users. This means that two users searching the same keyword may now see completely different apps.

A search result on the App Store.

Source

This change brings enormous potential for marketers. With personalization comes the ability to surface your app in more targeted, contextually relevant ways – if your metadata, creatives, and reviews align with the user’s specific needs.

What’s Driving It:

The rise of personalized search is being fueled by increasingly sophisticated data inputs. App stores now consider user history, download behavior, device-level preferences, and even time-of-day patterns when determining what results to show. Rather than relying solely on keyword matching, search algorithms are layering in contextual data like app usage, cross-app engagement, and location signals to surface the most relevant content to each user. 

What Approach Marketers Should Take:

  • Build out multiple value propositions and tailor your messaging for distinct segments 
  • Focus on creative variety – consider how different screenshots or CTAs might resonate differently 
  • Track shifts in keyword performance that may signal emerging personalized search patterns 
  • Localize not just for language, but for lifestyle and behavior trends in key markets 

Strategic Insight

In a world of personalized search, brands that maintain a single, static value proposition will lose ground. The winners will be those who treat the store listing like a modular experience, ready to adapt to any user, any context, at any time. 

The Future of Smarter Acquisition

As acquisition costs rise and attention spans shrink, smarter acquisition has become a brand imperative. What CPP(customized product pages) represent today, a personalized, intent-driven storefront, may soon evolve into real-time, AI-curated experiences that respond dynamically to user segments, behavioral signals, and even market trends. 

An app page.

Source

In the near future, we may see: 

  • App stores ranking pages not just by keywords, but predicted conversion likelihood 
  • Generative creative automation driving thousands of micro-variations of CPPs 
  • Increased interplay between web-to-app journeys and personalized store listings 

For now, success depends on smart targeting, creative alignment, and relentless iteration. The brands that win in this new era won’t just outspend competitors; they’ll outsmart them through relevance, efficiency, and a store presence engineered for performance. 

Voice Search and Ambient Discovery: Adapting ASO to a Screenless, Spoken Future

As voice assistants become more embedded in our everyday lives, from smart speakers to wearable devices, the way users discover and interact with apps is evolving. App discovery is no longer confined to a screen and a search bar. Instead, users are increasingly asking for solutions out loud: “Find me a meditation app” or “Book a table nearby.”

This trend toward ambient, voice-led search means apps need to be discoverable through spoken queries and understand natural language requests. It places a new emphasis on clarity, semantic relevance, and metadata that mirrors conversational phrasing.

Examples of voice search on the App Store.

Source

What This Means for ASO

  • App names and descriptions must reflect how people speak, not just how they type 
  • Metadata should include phrases that align with voice query patterns and real-world language 
  • Reviews and ratings (often read aloud by assistants) need to be clear, credible, and compelling 

Strategic Implication

The rise of voice doesn’t eliminate traditional ASO. It extends it. Brands must begin adapting their optimization strategy for a future where discoverability happens in a hands-free, multi-modal world, one where clarity, brevity, and natural phrasing win out over dense keyword stacking. 

App Intents and Predictive Surfaces

As operating systems become smarter and more anticipatory, app visibility is no longer confined to the app store itself. Platforms like iOS and Android are increasingly surfacing app functionality through features like Siri Suggestions, Spotlight Search, and predictive app actions. These are powered by App Intents – metadata and signals that help the system understand what your app can do and when it should be offered. 

In essence, your app can now be discovered without being explicitly searched for, if it fits the context of what a user needs at the right moment. 

Why This Matters 

App Intents allow apps to: 

  • Appear in Spotlight or voice search based on user behavior and context 
  • Trigger recommended actions like rebooking, ordering, or continuing where a user left off 
  • Surface key functionality (e.g., tracking, booking, paying) without opening the full app 

Strategic Opportunity

Optimizing for App Intents isn’t just about technical configuration; it’s about anticipating use cases. What are the moments where your app solves a problem quickly? How can you expose those actions to the OS? 

The future of discovery is ambient, predictive, and frictionless. Ensuring your app communicates its capabilities clearly and is structured to surface in those contexts will be a core part of ASO strategy going forward. 

What Comes Next

The evolution of App Store Optimization is not about abandoning the fundamentals, it’s about expanding what they mean. Keywords still matter. Visuals still matter. But context, intelligence, and adaptability now define who wins attention and who gets overlooked. 

As platforms get smarter, ASO must become more predictive. As user journeys get messier, store listings must become more modular. And as expectations rise, marketers will need to work faster, test more deeply, and collaborate more broadly across product, performance, and creative teams. 

If you need help with your ASO strategy, you can learn how our team can help you by contacting us here.

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Google taps large language models to cut invalid ad traffic by 40%

How Google works: Experiments, entities, and the AI layer beneath search

Google is deploying large language models (LLMs) from its Ad Traffic Quality team, Google Research, and DeepMind to better detect and block invalid traffic – ad activity from non-human or uninterested sources – across its platforms.

Why we care. Invalid traffic drains advertiser budgets, skews publisher revenue, and undermines trust in the digital ad ecosystem. Google’s upgraded defenses aim to identify problematic ad placements more precisely, reducing policy-violating behaviors before they impact campaigns. This would mean fewer wasted impressions, better targeting accuracy, and stronger protection for their budgets.

By the numbers. Google said there was a 40% reduction in invalid traffic tied to deceptive or disruptive ad serving practices. This is due to faster detection of risky placements, which is accomplished in real time by analyzing app/web content, ad placements, and user interactions.

Between the lines: Google already runs extensive automated and manual checks to ensure advertisers aren’t billed for invalid traffic. However, the LLM-powered approach could be a bigger leap in speed and accuracy and could make deceptive ad strategies far harder to profit from.

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Perplexity makes $34.5 billion bid to buy Google’s Chrome browser

Google Perplexity Cash Offer

AI search startup Perplexity today made an unsolicited $34.5 billion all-cash offer to buy Google’s Chrome browser, nearly double its own $18 billion valuation.

  • Perplexity told The Wall Street Journal that multiple large venture capital funds have agreed to finance the deal.
  • Google hasn’t indicated any willingness to sell Chrome.

Driving the news. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is appealing a 2024 court ruling that it illegally monopolized search.

  • The bid comes as U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta considers whether to force Google to divest Chrome to restore competition in search.
  • Chrome has about 3.5 billion users and more than 60% global browser market share.
  • Perplexity said it would keep Chromium open source, invest $3 billion over two years, and maintain Google as Chrome’s default search engine (though users could change it).

Why we care. Chrome is one of the most powerful gateways to search. Chrome gives Google a massive data advantage, which helps shape everything from ad targeting to SERP features. A new owner could upend default search deals, disrupt traffic patterns, and rewrite the rules for how audiences are tracked, targeted, and monetized.

Yes, but. Analysts say the sale is unlikely. In the meantime, Perplexity will grab some attention and make some headlines.

The big picture. Perplexity recently launched a new browser, Comet. Perplexity believes browsers are strategic control points for the next era of agentic search and online advertising.

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Gender exclusions spotted in Google Performance Max campaigns

PMax and the illusion of trust: ‘I’m Google – what could go wrong?’

Advertisers spotted a new beta feature in Google’s Performance Max (PMax) campaigns that allows gender-based audience exclusions – giving marketers more granular control over targeting. It was first announced, as part of the Google Ads API v 21, last week.

Why we care. The gender exclusion option could help brands tailor messaging, product feeds, and creative for different audiences, potentially improving ROAS and conversion rates.

How it could be used:

  • Separate campaigns for men’s and women’s products.
  • More relevant ad copy and creatives per audience.
  • Focused product feeds for higher shopping ad relevance.

Bottom line. If you have access to a Google Ads rep, now’s the time to ask to be added to this beta. Early movers could capture performance gains before rivals know the feature exists.

First seen. This update was first seen by Aleksejus Podpruginas, senior Google Ads campaigns specialist at Teleperformance.

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