<div><img width="800" height="450" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-800x450.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Search marketing jobs" decoding="async" fetchpriority="high" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-800x450.jpg 800w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-600x338.jpg 600w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-200x113.jpg 200w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-150x84.jpg 150w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-550x310.jpg 550w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></div>Land your next job in SEO or PPC. These brands and agencies are hiring to fill open search marketing positions right now.

Looking to take the next step in your search marketing career? 
Below, you will find the latest SEO, PPC, and digital marketing jobs at brands and agencies. We also include positions from previous weeks that are still open.
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Newest SEO Jobs 
(Provided to Search Engine Land by SEOjobs.com) 



SEO Manager
July 8, 2026 
Company Overview Tree Care Marketing Solutions (TCMS) is an award-winning digital marketing company based in Tucson, AZ, that specializes in marketing for tree care companies across North America. We are a premium provider in this space – clients come to us for a comprehensive online marketing solution, including a custom website, in-depth content, PPC, SEO, […]

SEO Specialist
July 6, 2026 
Remote opportunity. U.S. based applicants only. If you’re looking for a place where you can sharpen your SEO skills, push your expertise to the next level, and work alongside a team that genuinely loves testing, learning, and winning, we’d love to meet you. Honest Digital is one of the fastest-growing digital marketing agencies in the […]

SEO/GEO/AEO Manager
July 2, 2026 
Perrill is an award-winning digital marketing agency that helps businesses grow through tailored digital marketing, development, and design solutions that drive successful business outcomes. We partner with organizations that are serious about performance and expect their marketing to deliver. Our culture is grounded in four core values that define how we work and win: Get […]

Web Developer — Technical SEO
June 29, 2026 
About the role Accolade Solutions is a Finnish AI & growth agency and technical delivery partner. This role is the engineering side of our technical web and SEO infrastructure work — where technical SEO meets real software development. Your job is to make complex, JavaScript-heavy websites genuinely crawlable, fast, and render-parity-clean: making sure what a […]

SEO Specialist
June 28, 2026 
About the company Place Digital is a boutique, mission-driven marketing agency dedicated to helping therapy practices and rehab centers grow in sustainable, ethical, and genuinely life-changing ways. We’re not a traditional agency — we exist because the mental-health industry deserves better than burnout culture, predatory marketing tactics, and one-size-fits-all strategies. We help practitioners build profitable, […]

SEO Specialist
June 24, 2026 
Do you love nerding out on SEO and working with clients? If your friends & family are sick of hearing about your latest search rankings, then we’re your kind of people and you will love this job. $80k in year 1 + potential bonuses You will get an absolute masterclass on SEO and working with […]

Head of SEO
June 23, 2026 
About North Star Network North Star Network (NSN) is a global sports and betting media group that builds and operates leading digital brands connecting sports fans and bettors across 30+ countries. Our mission is to turn passion for sports and gaming into trusted information, data-driven insights, and responsible entertainment. We’re a multicultural and fully remote […]

SEO Success Manager
June 16, 2026 
Botify’s leading agentic AI search technology and seasoned experts ensure every brand has the power to be found, both in traditional and AI search. With one powerful platform, brands achieve visibility, relevance, and greater control across Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and more. Botify’s technology powers agentic workflows, AI-driven recommendations, and automated cross-platform indexation and deployment. […]

VP / Head of Search & AI Visibility
June 15, 2026 
VP / Head of Search & AI Visibility Location: United States (Remote / Hybrid Preferred) Reports To – President/Founder Company: Milestone Inc. (direct hire) Term: Full-time About Milestone Milestone Inc. is a leading Digital Experience Software and Services company dedicated to providing comprehensive solutions across all touch points that enhance customer engagement and drive business growth. […]

Senior SEO Strategist
May 30, 2026 
Location: Remote, North America Job Type: Full-Time Reports To: SEO Director Growth Track: SEO Director About Break The Web Break The Web is a boutique SEO agency built for in-house marketing teams at ambitious eCommerce and DTC brands. We help make SEO less annoying by bringing strategic thinking, clear communication, measurable progress, and real partnership […]

Newest PPC and paid media jobs
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Growth Marketing Strategist: Paid Media & Email
July 10, 2026 
NUS Consulting Group, located in Park Ridge, NJ, is seeking a Marketing Specialist to execute paid marketing campaigns and align with the company's marketing strategy. Your role will encompass managing omnichannel advertising efforts, including email marketing, Google Ads, and corporate website management. We value individuals with a strong work ethic and adaptability in a fast-paced […]

Paid Social Specialist, DTC Performance Marketing
July 10, 2026 
Overview The Paid Social Specialist role will play an important role in the day‑to‑day strategy and execution of our media investment, focused on delivering revenue growth for DTC. This is a performance‑based role, where you will be tasked with finding where to spend the next best dollar and proving out efficiency through sound measurement principles. […]

Google Ads/SEO/AI Specialist
July 10, 2026 
Digital Marketing Specialist Do you have a background that has involved creating successful Digital Advertising Campaigns, or implementing SEO & SEM strategies? We’re on the lookout for a confident, experienced and passionate individual to join our team as a Digital Marketing Specialist. As a Digital Marketing Specialist, you’ll be responsible for coordinating and implementing SEO […]

Paid Social Media Creator Intern — Hybrid (Real Estate Marketing)
July 10, 2026 
Veloce Capital is seeking a Social Media Content Creator Intern to help develop engaging digital content. This paid internship offers the chance to gain hands-on experience in marketing while working closely with the leadership team. Responsibilities include creating content for various social media platforms, filming videos, designing graphics, and attending events to capture moments. Ideal […]

Paid Social Creative Strategist — Data-Driven Growth
July 10, 2026 
Jones Road Beauty seeks a Creative Strategist, Paid Social to direct the creative vision for paid social campaigns. You will collaborate with the marketing team, contributing to various initiatives. A focus on data-driven performance is essential while maintaining the brand's unique voice. The ideal candidate will bring experience in creative strategy, understanding of social media […]

Other roles you may be interested in
Marketing Manager, Confidential (Dallas, TX)
Salary: $130,000 – $160,000
Develop and implement comprehensive marketing strategies covering traditional and digital channels to achieve regional objectives and enhance brand visibility.
Plan and execute integrated marketing campaigns, incorporating traditional and digital elements, to generate leads and drive sales.
Digital Paid Marketing Manager, IMA | Institute of Management Accountants (Remote)
Salary: $95,000 – $115,000
Serve as the day-to-day owner of all paid digital advertising efforts across the organization.
Build, launch, manage, and optimize campaigns across: Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Display and retargeting platforms
Manager, Paid Search, NP Digital (Remote)
Salary: $75,000 – $90,000
Deliver and execute paid search media strategies and recommendations for clients
Ensure new platform features and updates are considered and potentially implemented to clients’ campaigns
Digital Marketing Manager, Paid Social & PPC, 80Twenty (Hybrid, Newark, DE)
Salary: $90,000 – $110,000
Own paid media strategy and execution across Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Ads, Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) and other media platforms
Drive the growth of product lead volume while operating within defined budgets, cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and return on ad spend (ROAS) targets
SEO Marketing Manager (phone accessories), Velvet Caviar ($100,000 – $120,000)
Salary: $100,000 – $120,000
Own and execute the SEO strategy for a high-growth e-commerce business, driving organic traffic, revenue, and conversion improvements.
Conduct keyword research, competitive analysis, and SEO audits to identify and prioritize high-impact growth opportunities.
Paid Media Manager, Clients Blackbox, Inc. (Remote)
Salary: $90,000 – $125,000
Build, launch, and optimize Meta advertising campaigns focused on lead generation and appointment booking
Manage campaign budgets, audience targeting, bid strategies, and creative testing
Senior Manager, Paid Search, Talkiatry (Hybrid, New York, NY)
Salary: $150,000 – $180,000
Own and scale Talkiatry’s paid search program end-to-end, including forecasting, budgeting, pacing, bidding strategies, account structure, and creative testing for Google, Bing, and ZocDoc.
Develop and execute a rigorous testing roadmap, including ad copy, keyword strategy, landing page variants, and automation/algorithmic controls; quantify impact using sound experimental design.
Senior Paid Media Manager, Brightly Media Lab (Remote)
Salary: $70,000 – $100,000
Directly build, manage, and optimize campaigns within Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Facebook Ads (Meta).
Serve as the lead point of contact for your book of clients, taking full ownership of their success and growth.
Paid Search Specialist, Maui Jim Sunglasses (Peoria, IL)
Salary: $65,000 – $70,000
Plan, set up, and manage paid search, display, and shopping campaigns on Google Ads.
Manage and optimize advertising budgets to achieve revenue and efficiency targets.
Note: We update this post weekly. So make sure to bookmark this page and check back.

Land your next job in SEO or PPC. These brands and agencies are hiring to fill open search marketing positions right now.

The latest jobs in search marketing

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Youre-losing-the-SEO-budget-conversation-before-you-walk-into-the-room.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="You&#039;re losing the SEO budget conversation before you walk into the room" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Youre-losing-the-SEO-budget-conversation-before-you-walk-into-the-room.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Youre-losing-the-SEO-budget-conversation-before-you-walk-into-the-room-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Youre-losing-the-SEO-budget-conversation-before-you-walk-into-the-room-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Youre-losing-the-SEO-budget-conversation-before-you-walk-into-the-room-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Your CFO doesn't care about rankings or traffic. Frame SEO around business risk, CAC, and pipeline to build a stronger investment case.

If you’re walking into budget meetings with rankings, traffic, and keyword reports, you’re making the wrong case. CFOs don’t approve SEO budgets based on channel metrics. They approve investments that reduce risk, improve commercial outcomes, and justify capital allocation.
As AI changes search economics and customer acquisition costs climb, translating SEO into business risk is becoming just as important as the strategy itself. Here’s how to prepare for the conversation before you walk into the room.
Why SEO budget conversations break down
A global enterprise software business recently shared this with us: 
One of its core product lines generated 291 inbound demo requests in a single month in 2008. In the same month in 2026, it generated 274. Nearly two decades later, despite a digital marketing budget roughly eight times larger, it was generating fewer qualified opportunities.
That’s not a search strategy problem. It’s a structural problem. Their CFO had already noticed.
The head of search walked into the budget review with a 24-slide deck. Slide 3 showed rankings improvements. Slide 7 showed year-over-year organic traffic growth. Slide 12 covered keyword opportunities. 
All of it was accurate. None of it answered the CFO’s question: Why is it costing us more every year to generate the same number of qualified opportunities?
The CFO didn’t ask it right away. She let the presentation run. Then, at slide 19, she put her pen down and said, “This is all interesting. But I can’t see the connection to pipeline.” 
The head of search started to explain. The CFO looked at the CMO. The meeting was over.
Most heads of search lose the CFO budget conversation before they walk into the room. Not because their strategy is weak. Not because the numbers don’t stack up. But because they arrive with channel metrics (sessions, rankings, and organic traffic share), and CFOs don’t speak that language. 
CFOs speak P&L. They speak risk. They speak payback periods and opportunity cost.
The moment you open with “organic traffic grew 23% year over year,” you’ve already lost the room. A CFO hears, “I have no idea how this connects to revenue.” And if they’ve already seen a cost-per-opportunity trend like this client’s, they’re not just skeptical. They’re primed to cut.
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The structural shift most teams haven’t diagnosed
Before the tactics comes the diagnosis. Without it, the rest of this article is just a better way to lose the same argument.
In 2008, paid search was an undersupplied monopoly channel. High intent. Low competition. Linear returns. A dollar in reliably produced a predictable dollar out. There was no AI layer absorbing clicks before they happened, no comparison aggregators siphoning high-intent traffic, and no competitors with 18 years to build organic authority in your category.
That environment is gone.
Today’s search landscape is different. Organic authority is contested. AI Overviews intercept high-intent queries before users reach paid ads. Attribution models built for the old environment are still being used to justify budgets in the new one.
The diagnosis a CFO needs to hear isn’t, “We need more budget,” or, “Our rankings are improving.” It’s that the structural conditions that made search efficient have changed, and here’s your plan to adapt.
Why channel metrics kill your budget case
The instinct makes sense. You’ve spent months building organic authority, improving rankings, and growing traffic. You want to show that work. The problem is that presenting it as channel performance undermines the case you’re trying to make.
CFOs have been burned by marketing attribution models before. They’ve sat through enough presentations built on rankings charts and organic traffic growth to know none of it connects directly to the P&L. 
When you lead with channel metrics, the CFO’s first response isn’t agreement. It’s, “According to which model?” and “What does that mean for revenue?” Every slide that prompts those questions costs you credibility before you’ve made your argument.
The counterfactual problem
The deeper issue is the question every CFO silently brings into the room: “Would this revenue have happened anyway?”
It’s the hardest question in marketing attribution, and most presentations never answer it. They assume the connection between organic performance and commercial outcomes is self-evident. It isn’t. A CFO who’s watched the marketing budget grow for a decade while blended CAC drifts upward is right to question it.
If “How do we know those customers wouldn’t have found us anyway?” lands without a prepared answer, you’ve lost the thread. Don’t build your budget case on an attribution model you can’t defend under pressure. Build it on something a CFO can’t easily dismiss: risk.
Dig deeper: Stop paying for traffic: The enterprise CMO’s guide to ROI-driven SEO



The risk framing: The only language that works
CFOs aren’t optimizers. They’re risk managers. Their job is to protect the business from downside scenarios, allocate capital efficiently, and keep the P&L from being surprised. 
When you walk in talking about upside — “Here’s what more budget could achieve” — you’re appealing to the wrong instinct.
Lead with downside instead. Specifically, three risks a CFO can price and act on.
Competitive displacement risk
Organic search positions aren’t balance-sheet assets. They’re contested positions in a live environment. When you reduce investment, competitors don’t pause to match you. They accelerate.
The risk isn’t, “We’ll lose rankings.” That’s still a channel metric. The risk is this: 
“A 30% budget reduction doesn’t produce a 30% reduction in output. It creates a compounding decline over the next three to 18 months as competitor content accumulates, our positions erode, and recovery costs exceed the cost of maintaining them.”
That’s a deferred liability argument, not a channel performance argument. It’s the kind of risk a CFO can model. What does a 20% decline in organic share of voice add to CAC over 12 months if paid search has to compensate? 
Show that calculation. It shifts the conversation from “Can we afford this?” to “Can we afford not to?”
AI visibility risk
This is the newest and least understood risk in most boardrooms, creating an opportunity for the head of search who can explain it clearly.
As AI Overviews and LLM citations become the primary discovery layer for high-intent queries, organic authority is no longer just about rankings. It’s about whether your brand appears in the AI answer. 
Unlike a paid campaign that can restart next quarter with more budget, AI citation share depends on content depth, structured data, and domain authority built over months and years. Rebuilding that visibility isn’t a media buy. It’s a content and authority program measured in quarters, not weeks.
Here’s the connection most teams miss: Losing AI visibility doesn’t just reduce traffic. It forces you to buy back those same high-intent users through paid search, often at CPCs inflated by competitors that maintained their AI citation share. 
The CAC blowout described in the next section doesn’t happen in isolation. For many organizations, AI visibility loss is the trigger. That’s why it’s worth pricing explicitly instead of treating it as a future concern.
The CFO framing: 




“We’re holding strong AI citation share across our top 10 commercial queries. That position won’t maintain itself. Here’s what it cost to build, what it would cost to recover if we lost it, and the quarterly investment required to defend it.”
Dig deeper: The bureaucracy tax: How disruptors are winning AI search visibility



CAC blowout risk
This is the risk that lands hardest because, in many enterprise organizations, it’s already happening.
Return to the enterprise software client from the opening. The year-over-year picture is even more revealing than the 18-year comparison.
April 2025: Roughly $420,000 in Google spend, 681 inbound demo requests, and about $617 per opportunity.
April 2026: Roughly $310,000 in Google spend, 418 inbound demo requests, and about $741 per opportunity.
Spend fell 26%. Qualified opportunities fell 39%. Cost per opportunity rose 20% in a single year. Not despite the budget reduction, but partly because of it.
A CFO’s instinct is to reach for the simpler explanation: Performance was already declining, so the budget was cut in response. That’s a reasonable hypothesis. But it doesn’t fit the data. Cost per opportunity was rising before the budget reduction, which means the cut didn’t create the efficiency problem. It exposed the structural one that already existed.
The search environment had changed, but the budget strategy hadn’t. AI Overviews were absorbing high-intent category and solution queries before they became clicks. 
The organic authority that took years to build was producing fewer visits as zero-click search expanded. When paid spend fell, the organic foundation wasn’t strong enough to carry the load, and the combined effect was worse than either would have produced independently.
That’s the CAC blowout mechanism in practice. When organic weakens and paid compensates, blended CAC rises. When paid is reduced before the organic gap is fixed, CAC rises further. 
The CFO sees a trend moving in the wrong direction and concludes the channel no longer works. The real problem is that the structural relationship between paid and organic was never managed.
This isn’t unique to enterprise software. It’s the predictable result of treating paid and organic as separate budget lines with separate accountability, which is still how many enterprise search functions operate.
The CFO framing: Show the relationship between organic share of voice and blended CAC over the past 18-24 months. If organic visibility declined while paid CPCs rose, you have direct evidence of the risk. 
If you’ve completed a cannibalization audit and redirected spend from terms where paid competed with strong organic coverage toward genuine demand gaps, you have a concrete example of the structural fix in action.
The one thing most practitioners don’t do, but should
The most effective preparation most heads of search skip is briefing your CMO before you walk into the room. Not for approval. For stress-testing.
Your CMO has been in more CFO conversations than you have. They know which objections land hardest, the CFO’s current risk sensitivities, and which parts of your argument will invite scrutiny. You won’t get that perspective if you’re building your deck in isolation.
A CMO who’s already strengthened your argument is an ally in the room. A CMO hearing it for the first time alongside the CFO is a liability. They may hesitate over a number or qualify a claim you were confident in. The CFO will notice both.
Brief your CMO. Walk in aligned. The budget conversation is won or lost before you sit down.
3 questions that will always get asked
Before the questions comes the opening move.
Most practitioners get the first 60 seconds wrong. They either open with a summary of last quarter’s performance or jump straight into the risk framing without first establishing common ground. Both are mistakes, and CFOs notice both.
Lead with the structural diagnosis, not the channel results. Say something like:
“Before I walk through the data, I want to explain why we’re having this conversation. The search environment has changed materially over the past three years, and I want to show you how that’s affecting our cost per opportunity and what we’re doing about it.”
Then present the data. Then the risk framing. Then the questions below. You’ll get them regardless of how well the first 20 minutes go.
These aren’t hypothetical. Every head of search who’s been in this room has heard them. Prepare your answers before you sit down.
‘What happens if we cut this by 30%?’
The wrong answer is defending the cut as unacceptable or catastrophic. A CFO asking this question is often testing your understanding of your program’s efficiency curve, not necessarily planning the cut. Defensive answers signal that you haven’t done the modeling.
The right answer is prepared in advance:
“A 30% reduction applied across the program would cost us approximately [X] in organic traffic within six months, which, at our current organic conversion rate, represents [Y] in pipeline impact. If we need to find 30%, here’s where I’d make cuts with the least commercial damage, and here’s the threshold below which the program becomes structurally unsustainable and recovery costs exceed the savings.”
That answer does three things. It demonstrates P&L literacy, preempts follow-up questions, and shifts the conversation from defending a budget to solving a business problem. You’re not protecting a budget line. You’re helping the CFO make a better capital allocation decision.
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‘How do we know this isn’t just attributing conversions that would’ve happened anyway?’
The wrong answer is defending your attribution model. You’ll lose that argument, and with it, the credibility of everything else you’ve presented.
The right answer acknowledges the attribution problem and pivots to incrementality:
“You’re right that last-click attribution overstates organic’s contribution. We don’t use it as our primary evidence. Instead, we track quarters where organic visibility declined across our top commercial queries and paid CAC increased as paid search compensated. That’s our most defensible proxy for organic’s incremental contribution, and it’s deliberately conservative.”
Intellectual honesty about attribution limitations is the fastest way to build credibility with a financially trained audience. CFOs have seen too many marketing presentations built on models that prove whatever the presenter wants them to prove. 
The practitioner who acknowledges the limitation first and offers a conservative proxy will earn more trust than one who makes confident ROI claims.
‘What’s the payback period?’
The wrong answer is a long-term brand equity or compounding authority argument. CFOs with quarterly reporting cycles aren’t persuaded by three-year organic compounding narratives. Leading with one signals that you don’t understand how capital allocation decisions are made.
The right answer separates the investment into two components with different payback profiles.
Maintenance spend — the investment required to maintain existing positions, keep content fresh, and preserve technical health — has an immediate payback. It’s the cost of not losing what you’ve already built. The payback period is whatever it would cost to recover those positions in the future.
Growth spend — new content, category expansion, and authority building — should be modeled over six to 12 months for content targeting existing demand with known search volume. Show the underlying assumptions, including query volume, conversion rate, and revenue per conversion.
Show your work. A CFO who stress-tests your assumptions and pushes back on specific numbers is engaging with your model. That’s a better outcome than a CFO who nods along and cuts the budget anyway because nothing you presented inspired confidence in the methodology.
The data to bring, and the data to leave behind
Start by deciding what to cut. Most search budget decks don’t fail because they lack good data. They fail because they’re buried under metrics that erode credibility before the important numbers appear.
Leave behind
Keyword rankings in isolation: Unless you’ve connected specific ranking movements directly to pipeline impact, rankings are just another channel metric that invites the counterfactual question.
Organic sessions without market context: Growing 15% in a market growing 40% is decline. Year-over-year traffic growth without a market benchmark is a number the CFO can’t evaluate or trust.
Metrics that require a glossary: If you have to explain what a metric is before explaining why it matters, it doesn’t belong in the room. Every definition puts your credibility on hold.
Long-term brand equity arguments: Not because they’re wrong — they aren’t — but because they can’t be acted on within a quarterly budget cycle. Presenting them signals a mismatch between your timeline and the CFO’s.
Bring
Before you build the deck, decide what belongs on slide 12. Not a traffic graph. Not a rankings summary. Start with something like:
“Organic search offset an estimated $[X] in paid search dependency this quarter.”
Lead with the money you saved the business, expressed in CFO language. Everything below supports that opening claim.
Blended CAC trend over the past 18-24 months, segmented by channel. This chart makes the structural relationship between paid and organic visible and provides the foundation for the CAC blowout argument. It’s the clearest link between search investment and the P&L.
Organic share of voice compared with your top three competitors over time. This turns competitive displacement into something measurable. If a competitor gained ground while your investment stayed flat, show it.
Pipeline contribution by channel using a conservative, clearly labeled attribution model. State whether it’s last-touch or position-based. The disclosure matters as much as the number. A conservative model builds more credibility than an optimistic one that invites debate. 
A pre-modeled 30% cut scenario with specific commercial impact. This is the single most powerful analysis you can bring into the room. Have it ready before the question is asked.
AI Overview citation share across your top 10 commercial queries. It’s still uncommon enough in boardroom conversations to stand out. It shows you understand the evolving search landscape and grounds the AI visibility argument in your own data instead of industry generalizations.
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The conversation that wins budget
The enterprise software client in this article isn’t an outlier. The pattern — growing budgets, declining efficiency, and increasingly skeptical CFOs — is playing out across enterprise search, wherever AI Overviews absorb intent, paid and organic remain disconnected, and reporting still rewards channel metrics over commercial outcomes.
The practitioners who succeed aren’t necessarily the ones with the best search strategy. They’re the ones who’ve learned to translate SEO into business risk in language a CFO can act on. They walk into the room having briefed the CMO, prepared a modeled budget-cut scenario, and developed an answer to the attribution question before it’s asked.
That preparation is within your control. The structural shift in search isn’t. Neither is your CFO’s skepticism.
Whether you walk in ready for a capital allocation conversation or a channel performance conversation is up to you.

Your CFO doesn't care about rankings or traffic. Frame SEO around business risk, CAC, and pipeline to build a stronger investment case.

How to win SEO budget conversations with your CFO

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Why-frontloading-your-ad-spend-usually-backfires.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Why frontloading your ad spend usually backfires" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Why-frontloading-your-ad-spend-usually-backfires.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Why-frontloading-your-ad-spend-usually-backfires-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Why-frontloading-your-ad-spend-usually-backfires-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Why-frontloading-your-ad-spend-usually-backfires-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Launching with a bigger budget doesn't guarantee faster growth. Here's how to build momentum without wasting spend.


<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Why-frontloading-your-ad-spend-usually-backfires.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Why frontloading your ad spend usually backfires" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Why-frontloading-your-ad-spend-usually-backfires.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Why-frontloading-your-ad-spend-usually-backfires-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Why-frontloading-your-ad-spend-usually-backfires-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Why-frontloading-your-ad-spend-usually-backfires-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p>Most paid media campaigns shouldn&#8217;t launch with the biggest budget you can afford.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Spending aggressively before you&#8217;ve validated performance often leads to higher acquisition costs, slower optimization, and weaker stakeholder confidence when results fall short.</p>



<p>A phased rollout gives your campaigns time to generate meaningful data, improve bidding efficiency, and identify what&#8217;s working before you scale.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Here&#8217;s why frontloading ad spend usually backfires, the few situations where it may make sense, and how to grow your budget without sacrificing long-term performance.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-fire-bullets-before-cannonballs">Fire bullets before cannonballs</h2>



<p>For those of us who make a living driving growth through paid media, there&#8217;s one thing almost as bad as a tiny advertising budget: an advertiser who wants to spend too much, too soon.</p>



<p>Paid media launches should follow a plan. As Jim Collins wrote in &#8220;Great by Choice,&#8221; successful companies fire &#8220;bullets&#8221; first, learn from the results, and then fire &#8220;<a href="https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/fire-bullets-then-cannonballs.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">calibrated cannonballs</a>&#8221; with greater confidence.</p>



<p>Most campaigns aren&#8217;t ready for a cannonball on day one. The algorithms are still learning, Quality Scores haven&#8217;t matured, and you don&#8217;t yet know which audiences, keywords, or creative will perform best. That&#8217;s when acquisition costs and inefficiencies tend to be highest.</p>



<p>There are exceptions. Occasionally, years of historical data or a high degree of confidence justify launching more aggressively. Those cases are rare.</p>



<p>More often, frontloading ad spend creates expensive lessons instead of faster growth. The following scenarios explain why companies make this decision, and why a measured rollout usually delivers better long-term results.</p>


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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-your-budget-isn-t-a-kpi">Your budget isn’t a KPI</h2>



<p>As a marketing principle, it&#8217;s safe to assume that the amount you spend on ads shouldn&#8217;t be confused with &#8220;performance&#8221; (despite Google&#8217;s opinion).</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img decoding="async" width="691" height="471" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/The-Modify-Columns-workflow-in-Google-Ads.-Its-Performance-bucket-is…-not-actual-performance.png" alt="The Modify Columns workflow in Google Ads. Its Performance bucket is… not actual performance." class="wp-image-481935"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em><em>The Modify Columns workflow in Google Ads. Its Performance bucket is… not actual performance.</em></em></figcaption></figure>
</div>


<p>Street-smart, owner-operated companies typically start with careful ad budgets. It&#8217;s deep-pocketed intellectuals who are more likely to talk about how much they&#8217;re capable of spending. </p>



<p>In this context, intellectuals could mean high-ranking Fortune-something executives, venture capitalists, or even serial entrepreneurs suddenly flush with an unusually generous investment from a single backer.</p>



<p>When Nassim Taleb praises those with &#8220;skin in the game,&#8221; he&#8217;s urging us to empathize with people who bear the consequences of risk-taking. Risk asymmetry means splashy failures don&#8217;t always hurt the &#8220;intellectual class.&#8221;</p>



<p>Directly or indirectly, I&#8217;ve analyzed close to 1,000 ad accounts over the years. The pattern is clear: Advertisers who overspend early in pursuit of hypergrowth often flame out and lose stakeholder buy-in.</p>



<p><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/ppc-budgeting-adjust-scale-optimize-data-452493">PPC budgeting in 2026: When to adjust, scale, and optimize with data</a></em></strong>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-4-examples-of-frontloading-and-the-cases-against-them">4 examples of frontloading, and the cases against them</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-1-it-s-a-land-grab-gaining-market-share-quickly-is-our-justification-for-aggressive-early-spending">1. &#8216;It&#8217;s a land grab. Gaining market share quickly is our justification for aggressive early spending.&#8217;</h3>



<p>While I rarely agree that it&#8217;s a prudent course of action, it&#8217;s worth understanding the motivation behind frontloaded ad spend strategies.</p>



<p>This is an all-out attempt to achieve market share and first-mover advantages before new entrants catch up. I can think of all kinds of examples in fast-moving customer acquisition environments for tech startups.</p>



<p>We once came on the scene to help a startup with a much-diminished, modest, incremental Google Ads campaign. What was shocking was how little they&#8217;d learned. And how little money they had left after raising more than $250 million. Nearly all of it had been burned, including large sums on ads. There wasn&#8217;t going to be more where that came from.</p>



<p>We helped them measure KPIs such as &#8220;new accounts that actually led to revenue&#8221; and &#8220;lifetime revenue from those accounts.&#8221; No one had seen fit to do this in three years, as nine figures in funding blazed relentlessly.</p>



<p>Even bootstrapped startups celebrating their first $1 million to $2 million in &#8220;real&#8221; venture funding can get carried away by the same logic. It&#8217;s so unnecessary.</p>



<p>We&#8217;ve helped numerous niche SaaS startups, such as Clio for legal practice management and SuccessFactors in HR management, achieve prominence.</p>



<p>Small beginnings and careful ad budgets don&#8217;t preclude unicorn status. Matching your customer acquisition budget to your stage of growth is entirely feasible. It isn&#8217;t a life sentence of smallness.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Define your addressable market for initial paid growth efforts relatively tightly. Save the &#8220;huge addressable market&#8221; hype for conversations with larger investors who are viewing things over a longer time horizon.</p>



<p>As a helpful exercise, remind yourself how a behemoth like Uber got started. Its seed round was $1.25 million, valuing the company at a modest $4 million.</p>



<p>Feel free to think big. But don&#8217;t try to &#8220;act bigger than you are&#8221; with money and product-market fit you don&#8217;t yet have. Network effects and access to more capital will, if all goes well, accelerate growth once you&#8217;ve established a meaningful lead.</p>



<p>Why do founders sometimes get stars in their eyes and want to race through growth stages by lighting their newly raised, but finite, cash on fire? It could be because certain investors goad them into it. Or it could be because the team responsible for growth decided to party hearty with the money.</p>



<p>Eventually, the hangover hits. When investors see high churn rates and stratospheric CACs — or, worse yet, few tangible signs of customer acquisition of any kind — they squeal as if mortally wounded, even though they sort of asked for it in the first place.</p>



<p>Unit economics do matter. Other founders may have recently repealed the laws of economics, but as your mom once said, &#8220;If Billy jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?&#8221;</p>



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<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-2-nbsp-we-ll-learn-faster">2.&nbsp; &#8216;We&#8217;ll learn faster&#8217;</h3>



<p>It&#8217;s indisputable that predictive bidding algorithms perform poorly when conversion and value signals are sparse. More data helps them identify patterns associated with higher-value sessions.</p>



<p>Human teams also need to cycle through feedback loops to understand what works, what doesn&#8217;t, and how to iterate.</p>



<p>One example of faster learning is the quick discovery of necessary pools of negative keywords. Higher query volumes speed up that process, especially because lower volumes can keep many bad queries hidden in &#8220;Other Search Terms&#8221; for a long time.</p>



<p>But beyond a certain budget level, impatient spending becomes counterproductive.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>What if your sales cycle varies in length and typical order or deal value? If two or three months commonly pass between the first ad view and a sale, and you try to shoehorn too much budget into the first month, you&#8217;re still running ads blind, with little opportunity to iterate along the way. That can be an expensive lesson.</li>



<li>Overspending can raise your own CPCs. Barging into ad auctions that have reached a certain equilibrium and overbidding aggressively could trigger competitors to bid higher, too.</li>



<li>Your key metrics will typically be at their worst early on because you haven&#8217;t established Quality Scores in the ad platform yet. That means higher CPCs, all else being equal. The account for our &#8220;get spendy&#8221; client mentioned earlier recently saw CPCs drop by 80% between establishing Quality Scores and our optimizations. Good thing the initial pilot ran on a modest budget.</li>
</ul>



<p>Investing a deluge of funds into the worst ROI environment your budget is ever likely to see defies logic. Even four to six weeks later, ROI is almost always substantially better based on Quality Score statistical confidence alone.</p>



<p><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/stop-looking-perfect-ppc-budget-split-479548">Stop looking for the perfect PPC budget split</a></em></strong>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-3-we-re-pre-revenue-with-a-hefty-check-our-lead-investor-just-sent-over-we-want-a-quick-estimate-of-the-market-size-to-help-us-evaluate-the-investment-hypothesis">3. &#8216;We&#8217;re pre-revenue. With a hefty check our lead investor just sent over, we want a quick estimate of the market size to help us evaluate the investment hypothesis.&#8217;</h3>



<p>What could possibly go wrong?</p>



<p>This takes the land-grab approach even further into the intellectual ether. No customers — or virtually any other outcome — seem to be the goal, at least for now.</p>



<p>One or two steps removed, the investors are telling you plainly: We don&#8217;t care if we spend a huge wad of cash in the first month. Just get us a pile of data.</p>



<p>When Mr. Big&#8217;s name comes up, we shrug and figure, &#8220;Billionaire knows best.&#8221; We dutifully throw money at a performance channel, don&#8217;t ask it to perform, and feel sad 35 days later when, you know what, the investor suddenly isn&#8217;t going to invest another penny, and the founder is left with no credible Plan B.</p>



<p>A new investor pops in with questions.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>&#8220;Q: What is the company, exactly? I mean, what product or service do you provide?&#8221;</li>



<li>&#8220;A: We&#8217;re still figuring that out, but we know there must be a gold mine in there somewhere, given how many music fans are searching for [music examples redacted to protect the innocent].&#8221;</li>
</ul>



<p>The project never truly launches because it was never defined in the first place.</p>



<p>To be fair, fail-fast market research can be a good idea. Over a short period, we once spent around $10,000 on ads for a client exploring a telecommunications business model. He got a definitive answer about demand patterns in his space and decided not to move forward in that vertical.</p>



<p>Google Ads is an invaluable tool for market research. But if you&#8217;re not using it in a disciplined way to measure a business outcome that requires potential customers to clear a meaningful hurdle of intent, why bother? Scratch that itch with the free Google Trends tool, Google Analytics on a content site you create, or Semrush. Or hire a market research company.</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img decoding="async" width="1708" height="677" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Free-Google-Trends-market-research-shows-22bruno-mars-concert22-giving-22concert-near-me22-a-solid-run-for-its-money.png" alt="Free Google Trends market research shows &quot;bruno mars concert&quot; giving &quot;concert near me&quot; a solid run for its money." class="wp-image-481936" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Free-Google-Trends-market-research-shows-22bruno-mars-concert22-giving-22concert-near-me22-a-solid-run-for-its-money.png 1708w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Free-Google-Trends-market-research-shows-22bruno-mars-concert22-giving-22concert-near-me22-a-solid-run-for-its-money-768x304.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Free-Google-Trends-market-research-shows-22bruno-mars-concert22-giving-22concert-near-me22-a-solid-run-for-its-money-1536x609.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1708px) 100vw, 1708px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em><em>Free Google Trends market research shows &#8220;bruno mars concert&#8221; giving &#8220;concert near me&#8221; a solid run for its money.</em></em></figcaption></figure>
</div>


<p>The key is to rein in waste in unusual situations like this. You can&#8217;t always eliminate it entirely.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-4-there-s-a-vendor-who-won-t-work-with-us-unless-we-spend-more-out-of-the-gate">4. &#8216;There&#8217;s a vendor who won&#8217;t work with us unless we spend more out of the gate&#8217;</h3>



<p>Some ad platforms, and even third-party software tools or managed services, set steep minimums. Some advertisers are tempted to overspend to join these exclusive clubs out of FOMO. </p>



<p>A timely example is the early days of the OpenAI ad pilot. Steep minimums and uncomfortably high CPMs seemed to rule out entry for the typical advertiser.</p>



<p>As you&#8217;ve probably gathered, I think wildly overpaying for each ad interaction is a bad idea. Don&#8217;t twist yourself into a pretzel trying to rationalize it. At some point, the market will come to you. Just look at how much easier it is to get started with StackAdapt in programmatic compared with Google DV360 and The Trade Desk.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re small, grow first, and only step up to new levels when your company&#8217;s size and budget justify it. It&#8217;s a bit of the old The Millionaire Next Door logic. Buying a house you can&#8217;t afford or getting into a luxury car doesn&#8217;t make you rich. It might even prevent you from getting there.</p>



<p><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/ppc-growth-blocker-diagnose-fix-468368">How to diagnose and fix the biggest blocker to PPC growth</a></em></strong>


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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-earn-the-right-to-scale">Earn the right to scale</h2>



<p>The common thread running through most frontloaded ad spending mistakes is that they kill buy-in. Why taint an entire channel, or your company&#8217;s growth function, by accelerating spend so quickly that you skid into the ditch? You&#8217;ll get farther once you&#8217;ve built solid traction.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re a smaller business owner with skin in the game, it&#8217;s more than a buy-in problem. Nasty waste isn&#8217;t just bad optics — it can jeopardize your future.</p>



<p>So, when that overconfident investor or ad platform sales rep comes calling, urging you to go from &#8220;zero to sixty in 3.5,&#8221; it might be time to tap the brakes — or pray the airbags are functioning.</p>

Most paid media campaigns shouldn’t launch with the biggest budget you can afford. 
Spending aggressively before you’ve validated performance often leads to higher acquisition costs, slower optimization, and weaker stakeholder confidence when results fall short.
A phased rollout gives your campaigns time to generate meaningful data, improve bidding efficiency, and identify what’s working before you scale. 
Here’s why frontloading ad spend usually backfires, the few situations where it may make sense, and how to grow your budget without sacrificing long-term performance.
Fire bullets before cannonballs
For those of us who make a living driving growth through paid media, there’s one thing almost as bad as a tiny advertising budget: an advertiser who wants to spend too much, too soon.
Paid media launches should follow a plan. As Jim Collins wrote in “Great by Choice,” successful companies fire “bullets” first, learn from the results, and then fire “calibrated cannonballs” with greater confidence.
Most campaigns aren’t ready for a cannonball on day one. The algorithms are still learning, Quality Scores haven’t matured, and you don’t yet know which audiences, keywords, or creative will perform best. That’s when acquisition costs and inefficiencies tend to be highest.
There are exceptions. Occasionally, years of historical data or a high degree of confidence justify launching more aggressively. Those cases are rare.
More often, frontloading ad spend creates expensive lessons instead of faster growth. The following scenarios explain why companies make this decision, and why a measured rollout usually delivers better long-term results.
your competitors win.
      
Analyze your competitors
    
Your budget isn’t a KPI
As a marketing principle, it’s safe to assume that the amount you spend on ads shouldn’t be confused with “performance” (despite Google’s opinion).
The Modify Columns workflow in Google Ads. Its Performance bucket is… not actual performance.



Street-smart, owner-operated companies typically start with careful ad budgets. It’s deep-pocketed intellectuals who are more likely to talk about how much they’re capable of spending. 
In this context, intellectuals could mean high-ranking Fortune-something executives, venture capitalists, or even serial entrepreneurs suddenly flush with an unusually generous investment from a single backer.
When Nassim Taleb praises those with “skin in the game,” he’s urging us to empathize with people who bear the consequences of risk-taking. Risk asymmetry means splashy failures don’t always hurt the “intellectual class.”
Directly or indirectly, I’ve analyzed close to 1,000 ad accounts over the years. The pattern is clear: Advertisers who overspend early in pursuit of hypergrowth often flame out and lose stakeholder buy-in.
Dig deeper: PPC budgeting in 2026: When to adjust, scale, and optimize with data



4 examples of frontloading, and the cases against them
1. ‘It’s a land grab. Gaining market share quickly is our justification for aggressive early spending.’
While I rarely agree that it’s a prudent course of action, it’s worth understanding the motivation behind frontloaded ad spend strategies.
This is an all-out attempt to achieve market share and first-mover advantages before new entrants catch up. I can think of all kinds of examples in fast-moving customer acquisition environments for tech startups.
We once came on the scene to help a startup with a much-diminished, modest, incremental Google Ads campaign. What was shocking was how little they’d learned. And how little money they had left after raising more than $250 million. Nearly all of it had been burned, including large sums on ads. There wasn’t going to be more where that came from.
We helped them measure KPIs such as “new accounts that actually led to revenue” and “lifetime revenue from those accounts.” No one had seen fit to do this in three years, as nine figures in funding blazed relentlessly.
Even bootstrapped startups celebrating their first $1 million to $2 million in “real” venture funding can get carried away by the same logic. It’s so unnecessary.
We’ve helped numerous niche SaaS startups, such as Clio for legal practice management and SuccessFactors in HR management, achieve prominence.
Small beginnings and careful ad budgets don’t preclude unicorn status. Matching your customer acquisition budget to your stage of growth is entirely feasible. It isn’t a life sentence of smallness. 
Define your addressable market for initial paid growth efforts relatively tightly. Save the “huge addressable market” hype for conversations with larger investors who are viewing things over a longer time horizon.
As a helpful exercise, remind yourself how a behemoth like Uber got started. Its seed round was $1.25 million, valuing the company at a modest $4 million.
Feel free to think big. But don’t try to “act bigger than you are” with money and product-market fit you don’t yet have. Network effects and access to more capital will, if all goes well, accelerate growth once you’ve established a meaningful lead.
Why do founders sometimes get stars in their eyes and want to race through growth stages by lighting their newly raised, but finite, cash on fire? It could be because certain investors goad them into it. Or it could be because the team responsible for growth decided to party hearty with the money.
Eventually, the hangover hits. When investors see high churn rates and stratospheric CACs — or, worse yet, few tangible signs of customer acquisition of any kind — they squeal as if mortally wounded, even though they sort of asked for it in the first place.
Unit economics do matter. Other founders may have recently repealed the laws of economics, but as your mom once said, “If Billy jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?”
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
 
				
				
			
See terms.
		
2.  ‘We’ll learn faster’
It’s indisputable that predictive bidding algorithms perform poorly when conversion and value signals are sparse. More data helps them identify patterns associated with higher-value sessions.
Human teams also need to cycle through feedback loops to understand what works, what doesn’t, and how to iterate.
One example of faster learning is the quick discovery of necessary pools of negative keywords. Higher query volumes speed up that process, especially because lower volumes can keep many bad queries hidden in “Other Search Terms” for a long time.
But beyond a certain budget level, impatient spending becomes counterproductive.
What if your sales cycle varies in length and typical order or deal value? If two or three months commonly pass between the first ad view and a sale, and you try to shoehorn too much budget into the first month, you’re still running ads blind, with little opportunity to iterate along the way. That can be an expensive lesson.
Overspending can raise your own CPCs. Barging into ad auctions that have reached a certain equilibrium and overbidding aggressively could trigger competitors to bid higher, too.
Your key metrics will typically be at their worst early on because you haven’t established Quality Scores in the ad platform yet. That means higher CPCs, all else being equal. The account for our “get spendy” client mentioned earlier recently saw CPCs drop by 80% between establishing Quality Scores and our optimizations. Good thing the initial pilot ran on a modest budget.
Investing a deluge of funds into the worst ROI environment your budget is ever likely to see defies logic. Even four to six weeks later, ROI is almost always substantially better based on Quality Score statistical confidence alone.
Dig deeper: Stop looking for the perfect PPC budget split



3. ‘We’re pre-revenue. With a hefty check our lead investor just sent over, we want a quick estimate of the market size to help us evaluate the investment hypothesis.’
What could possibly go wrong?
This takes the land-grab approach even further into the intellectual ether. No customers — or virtually any other outcome — seem to be the goal, at least for now.
One or two steps removed, the investors are telling you plainly: We don’t care if we spend a huge wad of cash in the first month. Just get us a pile of data.
When Mr. Big’s name comes up, we shrug and figure, “Billionaire knows best.” We dutifully throw money at a performance channel, don’t ask it to perform, and feel sad 35 days later when, you know what, the investor suddenly isn’t going to invest another penny, and the founder is left with no credible Plan B.
A new investor pops in with questions.
“Q: What is the company, exactly? I mean, what product or service do you provide?”
“A: We’re still figuring that out, but we know there must be a gold mine in there somewhere, given how many music fans are searching for [music examples redacted to protect the innocent].”
The project never truly launches because it was never defined in the first place.
To be fair, fail-fast market research can be a good idea. Over a short period, we once spent around $10,000 on ads for a client exploring a telecommunications business model. He got a definitive answer about demand patterns in his space and decided not to move forward in that vertical.
Google Ads is an invaluable tool for market research. But if you’re not using it in a disciplined way to measure a business outcome that requires potential customers to clear a meaningful hurdle of intent, why bother? Scratch that itch with the free Google Trends tool, Google Analytics on a content site you create, or Semrush. Or hire a market research company.
Free Google Trends market research shows “bruno mars concert” giving “concert near me” a solid run for its money.



The key is to rein in waste in unusual situations like this. You can’t always eliminate it entirely.
4. ‘There’s a vendor who won’t work with us unless we spend more out of the gate’
Some ad platforms, and even third-party software tools or managed services, set steep minimums. Some advertisers are tempted to overspend to join these exclusive clubs out of FOMO. 
A timely example is the early days of the OpenAI ad pilot. Steep minimums and uncomfortably high CPMs seemed to rule out entry for the typical advertiser.
As you’ve probably gathered, I think wildly overpaying for each ad interaction is a bad idea. Don’t twist yourself into a pretzel trying to rationalize it. At some point, the market will come to you. Just look at how much easier it is to get started with StackAdapt in programmatic compared with Google DV360 and The Trade Desk.
If you’re small, grow first, and only step up to new levels when your company’s size and budget justify it. It’s a bit of the old The Millionaire Next Door logic. Buying a house you can’t afford or getting into a luxury car doesn’t make you rich. It might even prevent you from getting there.
Dig deeper: How to diagnose and fix the biggest blocker to PPC growth



  
a customer you lose.
      
See who’s stealing your traffic
    
Earn the right to scale
The common thread running through most frontloaded ad spending mistakes is that they kill buy-in. Why taint an entire channel, or your company’s growth function, by accelerating spend so quickly that you skid into the ditch? You’ll get farther once you’ve built solid traction.
If you’re a smaller business owner with skin in the game, it’s more than a buy-in problem. Nasty waste isn’t just bad optics — it can jeopardize your future.
So, when that overconfident investor or ad platform sales rep comes calling, urging you to go from “zero to sixty in 3.5,” it might be time to tap the brakes — or pray the airbags are functioning.

Launching with a bigger budget doesn't guarantee faster growth. Here's how to build momentum without wasting spend.

Why frontloading your ad spend usually backfires

<div><img width="1940" height="1083" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/10/chatgpt-atlas-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/10/chatgpt-atlas-1920.jpg 1940w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/10/chatgpt-atlas-1920-768x429.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/10/chatgpt-atlas-1920-1536x857.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1940px) 100vw, 1940px" /></div>Atlas will retire less than a year after launch as OpenAI shifts AI browsing and task automation into its desktop app.

<div><img width="1940" height="1083" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/10/chatgpt-atlas-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/10/chatgpt-atlas-1920.jpg 1940w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/10/chatgpt-atlas-1920-768x429.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/10/chatgpt-atlas-1920-1536x857.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1940px) 100vw, 1940px" /></div>
<p>OpenAI is discontinuing ChatGPT Atlas, its standalone desktop browser. The browser-based AI features are moving to the new ChatGPT desktop app, which includes ChatGPT Work, OpenAI’s work-focused agent, alongside ChatGPT Codex.</p>



<p><strong>The end of Atlas.</strong> James Sun of OpenAI <a href="https://x.com/JamesZmSun/status/2075290221932077535?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">confirmed on X</a> Atlas will be deprecated Aug. 9.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>“The current targeted date for deprecation is 8/9, and we’ll share more information in the upcoming days both in-app and via email,” Sun said.</li>
</ul>



<p><strong>One desktop app</strong>. The new ChatGPT desktop app becomes OpenAI’s primary desktop product with built-in browser capabilities. Instead of maintaining a separate AI browser, OpenAI is combining browsing, work-agent features, and Codex into a single app.</p>



<p><strong>Chrome users can keep Chrome</strong>. OpenAI also offers a ChatGPT and Codex extension for Chrome. That lets Chrome users access ChatGPT in their existing browser without switching to an OpenAI browser.</p>



<p><strong>Why we care. </strong>OpenAI is moving AI browsing from a standalone browser into the main ChatGPT app, where more users can ask questions, research brands, and complete tasks. That gives ChatGPT another way to shape discovery beyond traditional search results.</p>



<p><strong>Catch up quick. </strong>Atlas will be retired as a standalone browser <a href="https://searchengineland.com/openai-launches-a-web-browser-chatgpt-atlas-463623">less than a year after its launch</a>.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>ChatGPT Atlas launched on Mac in October. </li>



<li>OpenAI later released a dedicated Codex app and added an in-app browser in April. </li>



<li>Those features are now being folded into the new ChatGPT desktop app.</li>
</ul>






OpenAI is discontinuing ChatGPT Atlas, its standalone desktop browser. The browser-based AI features are moving to the new ChatGPT desktop app, which includes ChatGPT Work, OpenAI’s work-focused agent, alongside ChatGPT Codex.
The end of Atlas. James Sun of OpenAI confirmed on X Atlas will be deprecated Aug. 9.
“The current targeted date for deprecation is 8/9, and we’ll share more information in the upcoming days both in-app and via email,” Sun said.
One desktop app. The new ChatGPT desktop app becomes OpenAI’s primary desktop product with built-in browser capabilities. Instead of maintaining a separate AI browser, OpenAI is combining browsing, work-agent features, and Codex into a single app.
Chrome users can keep Chrome. OpenAI also offers a ChatGPT and Codex extension for Chrome. That lets Chrome users access ChatGPT in their existing browser without switching to an OpenAI browser.
Why we care. OpenAI is moving AI browsing from a standalone browser into the main ChatGPT app, where more users can ask questions, research brands, and complete tasks. That gives ChatGPT another way to shape discovery beyond traditional search results.
Catch up quick. Atlas will be retired as a standalone browser less than a year after its launch.
ChatGPT Atlas launched on Mac in October. 
OpenAI later released a dedicated Codex app and added an in-app browser in April. 
Those features are now being folded into the new ChatGPT desktop app.

Atlas will retire less than a year after launch as OpenAI shifts AI browsing and task automation into its desktop app.

OpenAI sets Aug. 9 end date for ChatGPT Atlas

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Googles-Universal-Commerce-Protocol-changes-the-path-from-search-to-sale.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Google&#039;s Universal Commerce Protocol changes the path from search to sale" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Googles-Universal-Commerce-Protocol-changes-the-path-from-search-to-sale.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Googles-Universal-Commerce-Protocol-changes-the-path-from-search-to-sale-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Googles-Universal-Commerce-Protocol-changes-the-path-from-search-to-sale-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Googles-Universal-Commerce-Protocol-changes-the-path-from-search-to-sale-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>AI can discover, compare, and buy products on users' behalf. Learn how to prepare your product data, Merchant Center, and structured data.

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Googles-Universal-Commerce-Protocol-changes-the-path-from-search-to-sale.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Google&#039;s Universal Commerce Protocol changes the path from search to sale" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Googles-Universal-Commerce-Protocol-changes-the-path-from-search-to-sale.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Googles-Universal-Commerce-Protocol-changes-the-path-from-search-to-sale-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Googles-Universal-Commerce-Protocol-changes-the-path-from-search-to-sale-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Googles-Universal-Commerce-Protocol-changes-the-path-from-search-to-sale-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p>As long as I&#8217;ve been in search marketing, the path has been simple: search query → click → buy. </p>



<p><a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo">SEO</a> followed the same model, with organic traffic, impressions, and click-through rate (CTR) serving as its primary measures of success.</p>



<p>Google&#8217;s <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-universal-commerce-protocol-ecommerce-seo-470460">Universal Commerce Protocol</a> (UCP) signals where search is headed, shifting from a discovery engine to a transaction layer. </p>



<p>Driven by the rise of &#8220;agentic commerce,&#8221; Google can now discover, evaluate, compare, and complete purchases entirely within its AI-powered experiences, including AI Mode, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail.</p>



<p>The SEO implications are significant. We&#8217;re moving from optimizing for clicks to optimizing for AI transactions. If your brand doesn&#8217;t speak the language of UCP, you risk becoming invisible to the next generation of shoppers. </p>



<p>Here&#8217;s what UCP is, why it&#8217;s reshaping digital marketing, and how to adapt your SEO strategy.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-ucp-the-infrastructure-behind-ai-transactions">UCP: The infrastructure behind AI transactions</h2>



<p>UCP is an open-source, vendor-agnostic standard that enables the entire commerce lifecycle, from discovery and cart building to checkout and post-purchase tracking, within AI interfaces.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Co-developed by Google with Shopify, Walmart, Target, Wayfair, Etsy, and other ecosystem leaders, UCP acts as a universal translator between AI shopping agents and merchants&#8217; storefront backends.</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img decoding="async" width="2048" height="1155" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-UCP-Pay-with-GPay.png" alt="Google UCP - Pay with GPay" class="wp-image-481925" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-UCP-Pay-with-GPay.png 2048w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-UCP-Pay-with-GPay-768x433.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-UCP-Pay-with-GPay-1536x866.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px" /></figure>
</div>


<p>Think of UCP as the ecommerce equivalent of HTTPS. Just as HTTPS standardizes secure communication between web browsers and servers, UCP standardizes how AI agents interact with online stores. Instead of requiring custom one-to-one integrations for every merchant, AI agents can securely browse inventory and complete purchases across millions of online stores.</p>


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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-how-ai-transactions-flow-through-ucp">How AI transactions flow through UCP</h2>



<p>When someone asks AI Mode to &#8220;find and order a replacement water filter for a 2021 Samsung French-door fridge with the fastest shipping,&#8221; UCP handles the transaction through a structured workflow.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-capability-publication">Capability publication</h3>



<p>The merchant publishes its merchant capabilities, including product search, live pricing, fulfillment options, and accepted payment methods.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-handshake">Handshake</h3>



<p>The AI agent reads the merchant profile, matches it with its own capabilities, and establishes a secure path forward, such as aligning on loyalty programs or supported digital wallets.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-action-execution">Action execution</h3>



<p>The AI searches for the product, verifies real-time inventory, builds the cart, and uses the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to complete a secure, tokenized transaction.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-human-escalation">Human escalation</h3>



<p>If user input is required, such as selecting a delivery window or confirming a shipping address, UCP pauses the transaction, prompts the user, and then hands control back to the AI to complete the workflow.</p>



<p><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-universal-commerce-protocol-search-conversions-471676">How Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol could reshape search conversions</a></em></strong>



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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-why-ucp-matters-for-search-and-seo">Why UCP matters for search and SEO</h2>



<p>UCP isn&#8217;t just a technical update. It changes how AI discovers, evaluates, and purchases products. Here&#8217;s why it matters for SEO.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-1-from-click-throughs-to-buy-throughs">1. From click-throughs to buy-throughs</h3>



<p>In an agentic search environment, website traffic is no longer the only measure of business value. As Google rolls out features like Universal Cart, allowing users to add products from multiple retailers to a single Google cart and check out with Google Wallet, the buying journey becomes much shorter.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Shoppers may never visit your homepage, category page, or product detail page. Your SEO objective shifts to earning product selection within the AI recommendation layer, turning a search query into a sale without intermediate web traffic.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-2-the-rise-of-hyper-personalized-conversational-queries">2. The rise of hyper-personalized, conversational queries</h3>



<p>Keyword research is evolving. Shoppers are no longer searching for &#8220;men&#8217;s running shoes.&#8221; They&#8217;re using highly specific, situational prompts, such as &#8220;Best running shoes for flat feet under $150 that can arrive by Friday.&#8221;&nbsp;</p>



<p>To match those queries, search engines need more than on-page copy. They need rich, queryable product attributes. UCP bridges that gap, allowing AI agents to match your inventory with highly specific user requests.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-3-less-checkout-friction">3. Less checkout friction</h3>



<p>Cart abandonment remains a persistent ecommerce challenge, often caused by lengthy forms, broken checkout flows, or unexpected shipping costs. Because UCP integrates with secure digital wallets and passes verified user data automatically, it removes many of those friction points.&nbsp;</p>



<p>For high-intent, urgent, or repeat purchases, merchants that support UCP can capture more conversions than competitors that send users to a separate checkout experience.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-4-merchants-retain-brand-control-and-customer-ownership">4. Merchants retain brand control and customer ownership</h3>



<p>When a transaction happens through UCP, the merchant remains the Merchant of Record. Brands still control pricing, fulfillment, and return policies while retaining customer relationships and first-party data. UCP simply provides the infrastructure that enables AI-powered transactions.</p>



<p><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/ai-decision-layer-agentic-commerce-481862">Winning the AI decision layer: From AI discovery to agentic commerce</a></em></strong>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-how-to-prepare-your-brand-for-ucp">How to prepare your brand for UCP</h2>



<p>If your SEO strategy is limited to blog articles and meta descriptions, you&#8217;re overlooking the technical infrastructure behind AI-powered commerce. To make your products eligible for UCP-powered search experiences, focus on these priorities.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-optimize-your-merchant-center-feed">Optimize your Merchant Center feed</h3>



<p>Your Google Merchant Center (GMC) account is no longer just for Shopping ads. It&#8217;s becoming the primary source of product data for AI discovery.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Enable the <code>native_commerce</code> attribute:</strong> To opt into UCP-powered checkouts, add the <a href="https://docs.cloud.google.com/retail/docs/attribute-config" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><code>native_commerce</code> attribute</a> to your product feed. Google recommends using supplemental feeds to apply it at the product level without affecting your primary feed.</li>



<li><strong>Map product identifiers:</strong> Ensure every product ID in your GMC feed maps one-to-one with your internal checkout API. If they don&#8217;t match, use the <code>merchant_item_id</code> attribute to align them.</li>



<li><strong>Complete your policy data:</strong> Keep your returns, shipping, and customer support information complete and up to date. AI agents prioritize merchants with clear policy data.</li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-align-structured-data-with-your-product-feed">Align structured data with your product feed</h3>



<p>AI search relies on consistent data across your website and Merchant Center. Keep your <code>Product</code>, <code>Offer</code>, and <code>Review</code> schema synchronized with your product feed. Differences between the two can trigger validation issues that make products ineligible for AI-powered checkout.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-prepare-for-conversational-attributes">Prepare for conversational attributes</h3>



<p>Google is introducing new semantic attributes designed for conversational AI search. Start preparing your inventory systems to provide:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Real-time inventory availability.</li>



<li>Direct answers to product FAQs, such as &#8220;Is this jacket machine washable?&#8221;</li>



<li>Product compatibility data, including accessory pairings, sizing guides, and model-specific replacements.</li>
</ul>


<a href="https://www.semrush.com/ai-seo/overview?utm_campaign=ic_sel_0102ai&#038;utm_source=searchengineland.com&#038;utm_medium=overlay&#038;onboarding=off" target="_blank">
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-beyond-clicks-seo-s-next-opportunity">Beyond clicks: SEO&#8217;s next opportunity</h2>



<p>The Universal Commerce Protocol reflects a broader shift in search. For SEOs, that expands our role beyond driving traffic.&nbsp;</p>



<p>By prioritizing structured product data, data readiness, and agentic commerce, you can position your brand to capture demand at the moment of intent. </p>



<p>The future of search isn&#8217;t just about getting found. It&#8217;s about getting bought.</p>

As long as I’ve been in search marketing, the path has been simple: search query → click → buy. 
SEO followed the same model, with organic traffic, impressions, and click-through rate (CTR) serving as its primary measures of success.
Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) signals where search is headed, shifting from a discovery engine to a transaction layer. 
Driven by the rise of “agentic commerce,” Google can now discover, evaluate, compare, and complete purchases entirely within its AI-powered experiences, including AI Mode, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail.
The SEO implications are significant. We’re moving from optimizing for clicks to optimizing for AI transactions. If your brand doesn’t speak the language of UCP, you risk becoming invisible to the next generation of shoppers. 
Here’s what UCP is, why it’s reshaping digital marketing, and how to adapt your SEO strategy.
UCP: The infrastructure behind AI transactions
UCP is an open-source, vendor-agnostic standard that enables the entire commerce lifecycle, from discovery and cart building to checkout and post-purchase tracking, within AI interfaces. 
Co-developed by Google with Shopify, Walmart, Target, Wayfair, Etsy, and other ecosystem leaders, UCP acts as a universal translator between AI shopping agents and merchants’ storefront backends.




Think of UCP as the ecommerce equivalent of HTTPS. Just as HTTPS standardizes secure communication between web browsers and servers, UCP standardizes how AI agents interact with online stores. Instead of requiring custom one-to-one integrations for every merchant, AI agents can securely browse inventory and complete purchases across millions of online stores.
AI recommends.
      
See your AI visibility
    
How AI transactions flow through UCP
When someone asks AI Mode to “find and order a replacement water filter for a 2021 Samsung French-door fridge with the fastest shipping,” UCP handles the transaction through a structured workflow.
Capability publication
The merchant publishes its merchant capabilities, including product search, live pricing, fulfillment options, and accepted payment methods.
Handshake
The AI agent reads the merchant profile, matches it with its own capabilities, and establishes a secure path forward, such as aligning on loyalty programs or supported digital wallets.
Action execution
The AI searches for the product, verifies real-time inventory, builds the cart, and uses the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to complete a secure, tokenized transaction.
Human escalation
If user input is required, such as selecting a delivery window or confirming a shipping address, UCP pauses the transaction, prompts the user, and then hands control back to the AI to complete the workflow.
Dig deeper: How Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol could reshape search conversions




	
	
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
 
				
				
			
See terms.
		
Why UCP matters for search and SEO
UCP isn’t just a technical update. It changes how AI discovers, evaluates, and purchases products. Here’s why it matters for SEO.
1. From click-throughs to buy-throughs
In an agentic search environment, website traffic is no longer the only measure of business value. As Google rolls out features like Universal Cart, allowing users to add products from multiple retailers to a single Google cart and check out with Google Wallet, the buying journey becomes much shorter. 
Shoppers may never visit your homepage, category page, or product detail page. Your SEO objective shifts to earning product selection within the AI recommendation layer, turning a search query into a sale without intermediate web traffic.
2. The rise of hyper-personalized, conversational queries
Keyword research is evolving. Shoppers are no longer searching for “men’s running shoes.” They’re using highly specific, situational prompts, such as “Best running shoes for flat feet under $150 that can arrive by Friday.” 
To match those queries, search engines need more than on-page copy. They need rich, queryable product attributes. UCP bridges that gap, allowing AI agents to match your inventory with highly specific user requests.
3. Less checkout friction
Cart abandonment remains a persistent ecommerce challenge, often caused by lengthy forms, broken checkout flows, or unexpected shipping costs. Because UCP integrates with secure digital wallets and passes verified user data automatically, it removes many of those friction points. 
For high-intent, urgent, or repeat purchases, merchants that support UCP can capture more conversions than competitors that send users to a separate checkout experience.
4. Merchants retain brand control and customer ownership
When a transaction happens through UCP, the merchant remains the Merchant of Record. Brands still control pricing, fulfillment, and return policies while retaining customer relationships and first-party data. UCP simply provides the infrastructure that enables AI-powered transactions.
Dig deeper: Winning the AI decision layer: From AI discovery to agentic commerce



How to prepare your brand for UCP
If your SEO strategy is limited to blog articles and meta descriptions, you’re overlooking the technical infrastructure behind AI-powered commerce. To make your products eligible for UCP-powered search experiences, focus on these priorities.
Optimize your Merchant Center feed
Your Google Merchant Center (GMC) account is no longer just for Shopping ads. It’s becoming the primary source of product data for AI discovery.
Enable the native_commerce attribute: To opt into UCP-powered checkouts, add the native_commerce attribute to your product feed. Google recommends using supplemental feeds to apply it at the product level without affecting your primary feed.
Map product identifiers: Ensure every product ID in your GMC feed maps one-to-one with your internal checkout API. If they don’t match, use the merchant_item_id attribute to align them.
Complete your policy data: Keep your returns, shipping, and customer support information complete and up to date. AI agents prioritize merchants with clear policy data.
Align structured data with your product feed
AI search relies on consistent data across your website and Merchant Center. Keep your Product, Offer, and Review schema synchronized with your product feed. Differences between the two can trigger validation issues that make products ineligible for AI-powered checkout.
Prepare for conversational attributes
Google is introducing new semantic attributes designed for conversational AI search. Start preparing your inventory systems to provide:
Real-time inventory availability.
Direct answers to product FAQs, such as “Is this jacket machine washable?”
Product compatibility data, including accessory pairings, sizing guides, and model-specific replacements.
customers won’t either.
      
See your AI visibility
    
Beyond clicks: SEO’s next opportunity
The Universal Commerce Protocol reflects a broader shift in search. For SEOs, that expands our role beyond driving traffic. 
By prioritizing structured product data, data readiness, and agentic commerce, you can position your brand to capture demand at the moment of intent. 
The future of search isn’t just about getting found. It’s about getting bought.

AI can discover, compare, and buy products on users' behalf. Learn how to prepare your product data, Merchant Center, and structured data.

Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol: The SEO implications

<div><img width="2048" height="1170" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/google-consolidation-1920-scaled.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/google-consolidation-1920-scaled.jpg 2048w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/google-consolidation-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/google-consolidation-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px" /></div>Google made updates to some of its canonicalization documentation to clarify timing and more technical details.

<div><img width="2048" height="1170" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/google-consolidation-1920-scaled.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/google-consolidation-1920-scaled.jpg 2048w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/google-consolidation-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/google-consolidation-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px" /></div>
<p>Google updated the <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/canonicalization-troubleshooting">canonicalization troubleshooting guide</a> to clarify how long it may take for Google to reflect those fixes within the Google search results. Google said &#8220;after fixing content issues, Google might hold pages in a duplicate cluster for up to two weeks.&#8221;</p>



<p><strong>What was changed. </strong>Google added a whole new section of content to the top of the page specifying the timing of canonicalization fixes, i.e. up to two weeks. Google also spoke about clustering and how pages need to be different enough to be clustered or canonicalized as one. </p>



<p>Here is what was added:</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="2040" height="958" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/google-canonical-doc-timing-add-dhCAvI9r.png" alt="" class="wp-image-482000" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/google-canonical-doc-timing-add-dhCAvI9r.png 2040w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/google-canonical-doc-timing-add-dhCAvI9r-768x361.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/google-canonical-doc-timing-add-dhCAvI9r-1536x721.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 2040px) 100vw, 2040px" /></figure>



<p><strong>Why we care. </strong>Knowing canonicalization fixes can take up to two weeks after Google processes your fix is good to know<strong>.</strong>  This way, you don&#8217;t keep trying to make changes to the page until Google has had the full two weeks to handle your update.</p>


Google updated the canonicalization troubleshooting guide to clarify how long it may take for Google to reflect those fixes within the Google search results. Google said “after fixing content issues, Google might hold pages in a duplicate cluster for up to two weeks.”
What was changed. Google added a whole new section of content to the top of the page specifying the timing of canonicalization fixes, i.e. up to two weeks. Google also spoke about clustering and how pages need to be different enough to be clustered or canonicalized as one. 
Here is what was added:




Why we care. Knowing canonicalization fixes can take up to two weeks after Google processes your fix is good to know.  This way, you don’t keep trying to make changes to the page until Google has had the full two weeks to handle your update.

Google made updates to some of its canonicalization documentation to clarify timing and more technical details.

Google clarifies canonicalization fixes can take up to two weeks to resolve

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-brings-AI-to-Android-—-heres-what-it-means-for-search.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Google brings AI to Android — here&#039;s what it means for search" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-brings-AI-to-Android-—-heres-what-it-means-for-search.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-brings-AI-to-Android-—-heres-what-it-means-for-search-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-brings-AI-to-Android-—-heres-what-it-means-for-search-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-brings-AI-to-Android-—-heres-what-it-means-for-search-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Google's latest AI announcement signals a future where agents use websites on behalf of people. Here's what to watch.


<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-brings-AI-to-Android-—-heres-what-it-means-for-search.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Google brings AI to Android — here&#039;s what it means for search" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-brings-AI-to-Android-—-heres-what-it-means-for-search.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-brings-AI-to-Android-—-heres-what-it-means-for-search-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-brings-AI-to-Android-—-heres-what-it-means-for-search-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Google-brings-AI-to-Android-—-heres-what-it-means-for-search-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p>Google <a href="https://mashable.com/article/googlebook-announcement-android-show-io-edition" target="_blank" rel="noopener">unveiled Gemini Intelligence</a> at the Android Show on May 12, alongside a new laptop called the Googlebook. The company describes Gemini Intelligence as a layer that runs beneath the Android operating system across laptops, phones, watches, and glasses.</p>



<p>The new Googlebook is built from the ground up around an AI agent that understands what&#8217;s on your screen and acts on it for you. Point at a date in an email, and it&#8217;ll set up a meeting. Select pieces of furniture in an app, and it&#8217;ll show you what they&#8217;d look like in your living room.</p>



<p>Now that an operating system can complete tasks without users even opening a webpage, how people search, discover, and conduct commerce will fundamentally change. Let&#8217;s look at how this will affect the search industry.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-the-shift-to-an-agentic-operating-system-means">What the shift to an agentic operating system means</h2>



<p>Up until now, a person had a question or intent, typed it into a search engine, received a list of links, and chose one. Getting your website to rank on that list was the prize, and the entire SEO industry was built around earning that click.</p>



<p>Gemini Intelligence assumes something completely different. A user still has search intent, but an AI agent now handles the middle steps — reading pages, filling out forms, and, increasingly, completing the task for you. Instead of you visiting a website, an AI agent visits it on your behalf.</p>



<p>One example is <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/work-life/google-chrome-auto-browse/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Chrome Auto Browse</a>, launched in January and built on Gemini 3. It handles multistep tasks like researching flights, filling out forms, scheduling appointments, and managing subscriptions, then pauses to ask before making a purchase.</p>



<p><a href="https://searchengineland.com/seo-leaders-explain-agentic-ai-ecommerce-execs-468540">Ecommerce has a good reason to move toward agentic AI.</a>



<p>A 2025 preprint <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09171" target="_blank" rel="noopener">evaluated the declared-tools approach</a> across online shopping, authentication, and content management. It found that handing an agent pre-structured interaction data cut processing requirements by 67.6% and reduced costs by 34% to 63%, compared with parsing the full HTML document. Task success was only slightly lower than with the traditional method: 97.9%, compared with 98.8%.</p>


<a href="https://www.semrush.com/ai-seo/overview?utm_campaign=ic_sel_0101ai&#038;utm_source=searchengineland.com&#038;utm_medium=overlay&#038;onboarding=off" target="_blank">
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-architecture-behind-gemini-intelligence">The architecture behind Gemini Intelligence</h2>



<p>AI agents prefer sites they can transact with cleanly because it&#8217;s more efficient. Gemini Intelligence only works if agents can reliably perform tasks on websites. </p>



<p>Two protocols make this possible: WebMCP makes a site&#8217;s actions callable, and the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) allows an agent to complete a sale. Together, they let an agent finish the job without a human having to load a page.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-webmcp">WebMCP</h3>



<p>This API lets a website declare its functions as structured tools an agent can call, such as searching inventory, starting checkout, or submitting a support request. This effectively lets you hand an AI agent a labeled menu.</p>



<p>Google co-developed WebMCP with Microsoft. An origin trial is live in Chrome 149, Firefox has committed to the third quarter of 2026, and Safari is expected to follow in the fourth quarter.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-universal-commerce-protocol-ucp">Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)</h3>



<p>This protocol gives AI agents a common language to discover products, build a cart, complete checkout, and handle orders without a user visiting the site. Google also has a consumer-facing surface layer called Universal Cart, which collects items as you move across Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail.</p>



<p>Google, Shopify, Walmart, Target, Etsy, Wayfair, PayPal, and Stripe co-developed UCP, which launched in January.</p>



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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-how-to-prepare-for-agentic-ai">How to prepare for agentic AI</h2>



<p>Websites are rapidly changing from destinations to backends, from places people visit to places agents quietly use. The operating system is becoming the search layer. The question is no longer whether you rank, but whether an agent can use your site.</p>



<p>To prepare, audit your most valuable actions, whether that&#8217;s a lead form, booking flow, or checkout page, and ask whether an agent could complete them instead. Check your <a href="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse</a> Agentic Browsing score the way you check Core Web Vitals to see whether an agent can use your site in addition to reading it.</p>



<p>If you run ecommerce, find out whether your checkout is reachable through UCP or ACP. Keep doing the retrieval work, because an agent still has to find and trust you before it can act on your behalf.</p>



<p><strong><em>Dig deeper. <a href="https://searchengineland.com/are-we-ready-for-the-agentic-web-468154">Are we ready for the agentic web?</a></em></strong>

Google unveiled Gemini Intelligence at the Android Show on May 12, alongside a new laptop called the Googlebook. The company describes Gemini Intelligence as a layer that runs beneath the Android operating system across laptops, phones, watches, and glasses.
The new Googlebook is built from the ground up around an AI agent that understands what’s on your screen and acts on it for you. Point at a date in an email, and it’ll set up a meeting. Select pieces of furniture in an app, and it’ll show you what they’d look like in your living room.
Now that an operating system can complete tasks without users even opening a webpage, how people search, discover, and conduct commerce will fundamentally change. Let’s look at how this will affect the search industry.
What the shift to an agentic operating system means
Up until now, a person had a question or intent, typed it into a search engine, received a list of links, and chose one. Getting your website to rank on that list was the prize, and the entire SEO industry was built around earning that click.
Gemini Intelligence assumes something completely different. A user still has search intent, but an AI agent now handles the middle steps — reading pages, filling out forms, and, increasingly, completing the task for you. Instead of you visiting a website, an AI agent visits it on your behalf.
One example is Chrome Auto Browse, launched in January and built on Gemini 3. It handles multistep tasks like researching flights, filling out forms, scheduling appointments, and managing subscriptions, then pauses to ask before making a purchase.
Ecommerce has a good reason to move toward agentic AI.



A 2025 preprint evaluated the declared-tools approach across online shopping, authentication, and content management. It found that handing an agent pre-structured interaction data cut processing requirements by 67.6% and reduced costs by 34% to 63%, compared with parsing the full HTML document. Task success was only slightly lower than with the traditional method: 97.9%, compared with 98.8%.
AI recommends.
      
See your AI visibility
    
The architecture behind Gemini Intelligence
AI agents prefer sites they can transact with cleanly because it’s more efficient. Gemini Intelligence only works if agents can reliably perform tasks on websites. 
Two protocols make this possible: WebMCP makes a site’s actions callable, and the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) allows an agent to complete a sale. Together, they let an agent finish the job without a human having to load a page.
WebMCP
This API lets a website declare its functions as structured tools an agent can call, such as searching inventory, starting checkout, or submitting a support request. This effectively lets you hand an AI agent a labeled menu.
Google co-developed WebMCP with Microsoft. An origin trial is live in Chrome 149, Firefox has committed to the third quarter of 2026, and Safari is expected to follow in the fourth quarter.
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)
This protocol gives AI agents a common language to discover products, build a cart, complete checkout, and handle orders without a user visiting the site. Google also has a consumer-facing surface layer called Universal Cart, which collects items as you move across Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail.
Google, Shopify, Walmart, Target, Etsy, Wayfair, PayPal, and Stripe co-developed UCP, which launched in January.
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
 
				
				
			
See terms.
		
How to prepare for agentic AI
Websites are rapidly changing from destinations to backends, from places people visit to places agents quietly use. The operating system is becoming the search layer. The question is no longer whether you rank, but whether an agent can use your site.
To prepare, audit your most valuable actions, whether that’s a lead form, booking flow, or checkout page, and ask whether an agent could complete them instead. Check your Lighthouse Agentic Browsing score the way you check Core Web Vitals to see whether an agent can use your site in addition to reading it.
If you run ecommerce, find out whether your checkout is reachable through UCP or ACP. Keep doing the retrieval work, because an agent still has to find and trust you before it can act on your behalf.
Dig deeper. Are we ready for the agentic web?

Google's latest AI announcement signals a future where agents use websites on behalf of people. Here's what to watch.

Gemini Intelligence signals a new era for search and commerce

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Resolve-SEL-20260713-feature.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Resolve-SEL-20260713-feature.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Resolve-SEL-20260713-feature-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Resolve-SEL-20260713-feature-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/Resolve-SEL-20260713-feature-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Don’t get distracted by flashy metrics like search volume. Instead, focus on the metrics that matter: legitimacy, credibility, and authority.

Link building for legitimacy means earning authoritative backlinks, brand mentions, and media coverage that signal trust, expertise, and credibility to search engines and AI systems. Instead of chasing link volume, it uses digital PR, original research, thought leadership, and journalist relationships to earn editorial citations — the authority signals behind Google’s E-E-A-T framework that help brands appear in AI Overviews, get cited by LLMs, and build visibility that survives ranking swings.



A little competition is healthy in almost every part of life. It challenges us and pushes us to keep striving for bigger, better things.
But in today’s search environment, LLMs and algorithm updates are changing the game and reshaping search behavior, making it nearly impossible to keep up.
The metrics you once used to keep brands afloat (e.g., traffic, DA increases, keyword rankings) no longer define SEO success. You can top the SERP and still see minimal conversions. 
If we keep chasing these metrics, we’ll be left behind. We have to adapt.
Instead of focusing on these metrics, we need to widen our view to the “metrics” that truly matter: trust and brand authority. Unlike traditional metrics, trust and authority don’t come easily or quickly. 
It takes time to spread the word about your brand and even more time to build trust. But once you do, it takes a lot to knock it down. 
Traffic can dip overnight after an algorithm update. Trust can’t.
But how can you build trust and boost your brand when every other organization is trying to do the same? And how do you measure such nebulous ideas? 
The answers may involve some nuance, but they’re simpler than you think. It just takes a shift in perspective.
Why link building is more than just rankings now
For years, link building was a popularity contest. Whoever earned the most votes won spots at the top of the SERP. 
But over time, Google and other search engines updated their algorithms to improve searchers’ experiences. With each update, Google has cracked down on more sites trying to “hack” the system with high backlink volume instead of links with real editorial and searcher value. Inevitably, countless sites lost traffic, with repercussions still felt today.
Instead of ranking by backlink volume, Google began prioritizing relevance to the searcher’s query, industry trust, and authority. That means big-name brands with similar content and keywords often attract more searchers than the little guy.
Large language models (LLMs) and Google’s AI Overviews have widened this divide even further. These systems use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to pull sources with the most relevant information, often preferring proprietary data. Because of this, if you’re citing the same information as a top-tier publication, RAG will often choose the top-tier publication to avoid spreading misinformation. 
With this shift, new generations of searchers are increasingly using AI instead of search tools — 61% of Gen Z use generative AI in lieu of Google, according to a 2025 Resolve study.
That doesn’t mean all link building signals spam to Google and LLMs. Instead, backlinks should work alongside authority signals. 
Publications and journalists citing your brand signal authority. Original content and proprietary data signal authority. Eye-catching graphics and informative videos signal authority. 
Once Google and LLMs see these signals and the backlinks that act as votes of confidence, your site is more likely to rank higher in SERPs, appear in the AI Overviews, and receive more citations in LLM answers.
The role of E-E-A-T in a competitive search environment
In 2018, Google updated its rater guidelines so content showing expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) could better reach relevant searchers. In 2022, it added another E: experience. Together, these factors form a framework for how Google evaluates a site’s credibility and legitimacy:
Experience: Whether the site’s author has personally engaged with the topic, such as a forum of users who tested a product or a gardener’s blog post about personal trials with pest prevention.
Expertise: Whether the content’s author has credentials that support their information and advice.
Authoritativeness: Whether other credible sources and industry voices have linked back to the site, establishing it as a leading figure in the community.
Trustworthiness: Whether the site is transparent and consistently accurate. It doesn’t deceive users or engage in link-building activities that manipulate them.
While E-E-A-T plays a role in on-page SEO — author bios can demonstrate expertise, accurate sourcing can demonstrate trustworthiness, and so on — it also plays a role in off-page SEO. Specifically, Google evaluates E-E-A-T based on who links to you and which journalists rely on you as a trusted source. Both on-page and off-page E-E-A-T affect how Google assesses your value to searchers and whether you provide trustworthy, accurate information.
If your site consistently earns backlinks from dozens of irrelevant sites, Google sees that as a sign of low quality. But if a few journalists mention your brand because of a study you just published, Google is more likely to see that as a vote of confidence. 
In this way, link quantity no longer signals legitimacy. Google looks for backlinks that demonstrate real value.
You can’t earn these links half-heartedly. You earn them with a multifaceted strategy that works on and off the page.
Off-page SEO tactics that demonstrate value to search engines
So what can you do to build strong links that search engines and LLMs use to evaluate whether you’re a trusted source? They don’t come from a single outreach. They come from multiple tactics you address continuously.
Creating linkable assets
To show that people actually want to link to your site, you need to create content that people and publishers want to reference. For brands used to quick, easy links, this may mean investing more in content than they’re used to. A typical “how-to” article or listicle won’t cut it anymore.
Instead, “linkable” now means anything journalists or people find unique and engaging — something they haven’t seen before. This could include any of the following content formats:
Original data and proprietary research: One of the best ways to catch searchers’ and journalists’ attention is to publish information they can’t find anywhere else. In such a competitive, information-rich search environment, that means creating original research no one has created before. When a journalist wants to reference a statistic and your site is the only one with it, you earn a natural backlink.
Thought leadership and expert commentary: If you feature an original perspective from a credible voice at your brand, you provide a quote publishers may use later.
Authoritative long-form guides: Anyone can answer a question simply. But if you answer it fully and address every related follow-up question, you can earn more links over time as searchers go deeper into their research.
Engaging visuals and infographics: YouTube mentions strongly correlated with sites featured in AI Overviews, according to Ahrefs. That means visuals, especially videos, carry extra weight in search algorithms. It isn’t limited to videos, either. Informative infographics give publishers something they crave: a visual they can use with their own audience.
While these formats may take more time, effort, and money to create, they’re often more sustainable than other content. They help earn credible citations from publications and build industry authority that no algorithm update can disrupt.
Digital PR
At the heart of every authority-building discussion is digital PR — and for good reason. It bridges brand establishment and link building. It can help you earn more links and spread the word about your organization through credible journalists. In the eyes of search engines, that’s exactly what they look for when assessing your site’s legitimacy.
Unlike traditional PR, digital PR focuses on generating online coverage through backlinks from news sites and media outlets. Often, this means creating assets and proprietary data journalists find interesting, then pitching stories that align with their beat. 
Many of these publications hold major sway online and have large audiences that can spread the word about your brand. If the publication is highly authoritative, other journalists may naturally pick up the news and share it organically. This can be amplified through syndication, when a media conglomerate posts an article on subsidiary sites, helping you earn dozens of links at once.
Some of the best digital PR campaigns use one or more of these tactics:
Data-led PR campaigns: When creating a campaign, don’t focus on topics or ideas you find interesting. Check local news sites or Google News to see what journalists find interesting and which topics are trending. If you consider journalists’ intent from the start, you’re more likely to earn responses and successful link placements.
Newsjacking or reactive PR: If your organization can move quickly, newsjacking or reactive PR can be one of the best ways to get media attention fast. You jump on breaking news relevant to your brand by providing expert opinions, data, or commentary journalists can use when covering the story.
Proactive PR: Proactive PR anticipates trends before they break. You provide unique insights that align with recurring news, holidays, and relevant media moments.
Contributed content and guest features: Featured content, written by you or experts at your organization, can be one of the best ways to speak directly to a publication’s audience and earn recognition.
These tactics elevate your brand to a level competitors can’t easily reach. 
Building relationships with journalists, publishers, and industry authorities
Even the most interesting proprietary data, packaged in an expertly built linkable analysis, can fail if you don’t approach journalist outreach strategically. 




Today, journalists receive countless PR pitches every day that can either help or hinder their work. Nearly nine in 10 journalists say at least some of their stories come from PR pitches, according to a 2026 MuckRack study. 
Still, the same survey found that 54% seldom or never respond to most PR pitches. The reason? Relevance. Nearly half of journalists in the study said relevant pitches are rare.
If a journalist at an economics journal receives a pitch about music-listening trends, they’ll likely turn it down because only a small share of their readers would care. It’s nothing personal. Journalists build careers around specific topics and beats, and PR professionals should supplement that beat, not distract from it.
Instead, approach journalist outreach as relationship-building: a two-way exchange that benefits both parties. Treat the person on the other end as a real person.
Personalize your emails. 
If they say no, respond kindly. They may bite on your next pitch. 
Share their publications on social media. 
Leave comments. 
Cite them in future content. 
The more you build the relationship, the more likely they are to respond to future opportunities. Journalists are more likely to respond positively to follow-ups or second pitches when they know you have good data on hand.
PR relationships grow over time, so even if your first pitch doesn’t fit a journalist’s beat, don’t hesitate to reach back out with new data.
How to measure metrics that reflect real brand authority
Authority, trust, and legitimacy are less concrete than hard metrics like traffic or keyword positioning. But they’re even more crucial today. Traffic volume may seem positive, but it can signal temporary attention from keyword manipulation, which can change quickly after an update or once web crawlers detect that searchers are losing interest in the page.
On the other hand, authority and legitimacy last. And you can still measure the impact of these tactics through metrics like:
Earned media placements: Track publications that cover your brand, including unlinked brand mentions. This is a strong measure of brand credibility.
Branded search volume: As people discover your brand through different publications, they’ll search for it naturally.
Industry coverage: After you successfully reach one publication, others — even those you haven’t contacted — may naturally cite you to stay relevant. This helps establish you as an authority in your industry.
Conversions: When searchers find you credible, they’re more likely to trust you and your products or services, leading to more conversions — the metric every SEO and marketing professional strives for.
Organic ranking improvements for target keywords: While traditional link building can improve keyword rankings, rankings can also show how search engines compare you to others on the SERP. As you become more authoritative, you may start to see movement.




These “metrics” don’t appear overnight. 
Creating proprietary data takes effort. 
Building trust with journalists takes relationship-building. 
Growing authority takes time. 
Be patient. You’ll see results.
How to build a credibility-focused link building strategy
Even if you know the best practices for building SEO authority, creating a full campaign around them can be a different beast. That’s why we’ve created this step-by-step guide:
Step 1 — Define target publications: Identify five to 10 publications your audience trusts most and Google sees as authoritative in your space. These are your primary link targets. Your goal is to earn coverage from journalists in these spaces.
Step 2 — Develop linkable assets: Create at least a couple of content pieces or media assets designed to interest your target publications. Rely on proprietary data from original surveys, visual guides, and thought leadership.
Step 3 — Launch a digital PR campaign: Pitch these assets proactively to target publications. Use platforms like Connectively or MuckRack to generate ongoing backlink opportunities with writers covering stories relevant to your linkable assets.
Step 4 — Nurture relationships over time: Treat every positive media interaction as the start of a longer relationship. Follow up with useful information, engage with the coverage, and build rapport journalists can rely on.
Step 5 — Measure and iterate: Review the metrics above quarterly and adjust your content and outreach strategies accordingly.




This process can easily consume your team, especially if you’re working with limited resources or know-how. 
In these cases, it may be worth working with a link building and digital PR specialist who can amplify your efforts and keep up with algorithm updates. Doing so can keep your brand afloat long term, so you don’t have to sweat the small stuff.
Build brand authority that lasts with Resolve
Today, most SEOs know quality stands the test of time over quantity. But for most brands, the hard part is keeping their eye on the prize. 
Don’t get distracted by flashy metrics or competitors seeing temporary traffic spikes. Instead, focus on what matters: real authority and legitimacy built through years of content production, PR outreach, and relationship-building.
When that patience is hard to come by, Resolve can step in. 
Resolve works with brands to build credibility-focused SEO campaigns through linkable content, data-driven digital PR, and boots-on-the-ground link building. With it, you can help your brand build sustainable organic growth — not temporary results that decay after the next algorithm update.




It’s an approach we’ve seen pay off. A recent data-led campaign for EZ Contacts earned more than 1,000 placements in outlets like the New York Post and Yahoo. As coverage built, its visibility in ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews doubled — the kind of durable growth that lasts beyond the next algorithm update.
Ready to build links that last? Visit growresolve.com today to learn more.
FAQs about link building strategy and brand authority
What is the difference between link building and Digital PR?
Link building and digital PR overlap significantly, but they aren’t identical. Link building is the broader practice of acquiring backlinks from other websites to improve search authority. Digital PR is a specific approach within that category — one focused on earning backlinks through media coverage, journalist relationships, and placements in credible publications rather than directory submissions, guest post exchanges, or other lower-authority tactics. Digital PR tends to generate the highest-quality backlinks from outlets with real editorial standards while building brand visibility and consumer trust in ways other link building methods don’t.
How long does a credibility-focused link building campaign take to produce results?
Authority backlinks and earned media coverage don’t produce overnight results. That’s one honest trade-off of a credibility-focused approach versus more aggressive tactics. Most brands start seeing meaningful domain authority gains and initial ranking movement within three to six months of consistent campaign execution. More competitive keywords and higher-authority placements may take longer. The advantage is that results compound and last: links from credible publications don’t disappear, journalist relationships recur, and the brand authority built through consistent coverage keeps generating value long after the initial campaign investment.
What is an authority backlink, and how is it different from a regular backlink?
An authority backlink comes from a source that search engines — and its users — treat as credible and trustworthy. These are typically publications with high domain authority, real editorial processes, genuine audiences, and topical relevance to your industry. A regular backlink can come from any site willing to link to yours, regardless of authority, relevance, or editorial standards. The distinction matters because search engines weigh backlinks based on the authority of the linking source. One link from a high-authority industry publication can carry more weight than dozens from low-authority sites — and signal E-E-A-T credibility in a way bulk links never can.
Can brand mentions count as a link building signal even without a hyperlink?
Yes. Google can associate brand mentions with brand entities even when those mentions don’t include a hyperlink. Unlinked mentions in credible publications, especially in relevant industry coverage, contribute to the brand authority signals that inform E-E-A-T evaluation. That’s why digital PR efforts that generate coverage, even without always securing a link, still strengthen a brand’s overall search authority. It also reinforces why a credibility-focused off-page SEO strategy shouldn’t be reduced to link acquisition alone. The real goal is building a brand that publications want to mention, cite, and cover.
What’s the risk of using outdated link building tactics?
The risks are real, ranging from ineffectiveness to active penalties. Tactics like link buying, link exchange schemes, private blog networks (PBNs), and manipulative anchor text optimization violate Google’s guidelines. They can trigger manual actions or algorithmic penalties that significantly suppress a site’s visibility. Even when they don’t trigger immediate penalties, they often lose effectiveness as algorithm updates get better at identifying and devaluing manufactured signals. Recovering from a link-related penalty is time-consuming and expensive. Investing in credibility-focused link building from the start is lower-risk and more durable than repairing damage from outdated tactics.

Don’t get distracted by flashy metrics like search volume. Instead, focus on the metrics that matter: legitimacy, credibility, and authority.

Link building for legitimacy: Building brand credibility in a competitive search environment by Resolve

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/12/chatgpt-ads-1920.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="ChatGPT ads" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/12/chatgpt-ads-1920.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/12/chatgpt-ads-1920-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/12/chatgpt-ads-1920-1536x864.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>OpenAI also said ChatGPT Ads are live in Japan and South Korea.

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/12/chatgpt-ads-1920.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="ChatGPT ads" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/12/chatgpt-ads-1920.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/12/chatgpt-ads-1920-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/12/chatgpt-ads-1920-1536x864.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p>ChatGPT Ads has sent out an email to advertisers announcing new ChatGPT Ads Manager updates and ChatGPT Ads experience updates.  The updates include custom audiences, new overview tab, suggested ad drafts, as well as a refreshed ad card format and expanding ads in Japan and South Korea.</p>



<p>Here is what is new:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Custom audiences</strong>: Upload lists with 25K or more users to <a href="https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001346-set-up-custom-audiences-for-your-campaign">include or suppress audiences from campaigns</a>. Bid multipliers can also be set for audiences at the ad group level. We covered this in <a href="https://searchengineland.com/chatgpt-ads-rolling-out-audience-lists-481712">more detail over here</a> earlier this week.</li>



<li><strong>Overview tab</strong>: You can monitor account health, review recommended tasks that can help improve campaign performance, and analyze key performance metrics in a larger, more flexible trend chart.</li>



<li><strong>Suggested ad drafts</strong>: If your campaign could benefit from broader content coverage to optimize delivery, you may see the option to select &#8216;Add new ad&#8217; in your campaign view. This feature uses existing website metadata to prefill an ad draft with an image, title, and description for you to review, edit, and assign to a campaign and ad group. It does not generate new copy or imagery with AI. We covered this in more detail <a href="https://searchengineland.com/openai-can-generate-chatgpt-ads-for-you-481651">over here earlier this week</a>.</li>



<li><strong>ChatGPT Ads are live in Japan and South Korea</strong>: Campaigns can now target users in Japan and South Korea, expanding reach for advertisers doing business in those markets.</li>



<li><strong>Refreshed static ad card format</strong>: OpenAI is starting to roll out a refreshed static ad card format across web and mobile that is more compact and easier to read, with larger visual elements. This actually rolled out in <a href="https://www.seroundtable.com/chatgpt-ads-drops-sponsored-label-41584.html">late June</a>. Here is the before and after:</li>
</ul>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="1352" height="344" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/new-chatgpt-ads-format.png" alt="" class="wp-image-481915" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/new-chatgpt-ads-format.png 1352w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/new-chatgpt-ads-format-768x195.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1352px) 100vw, 1352px" /></figure>



<p><strong>Why we care. </strong>ChatGPT Ads are new, and OpenAI continues to add new features, expand to new markets and test new ad formats and treatements.</p>



<p>Make sure you stay on top of these changes, experiment and continue to fine-tune your ad creatives and campaigns. </p>


<a href="https://www.semrush.com/ai-seo/overview?utm_campaign=ic_sel_0102ai&#038;utm_source=searchengineland.com&#038;utm_medium=overlay&#038;onboarding=off" target="_blank">
  <div>
    
    <div>
      
      <div id="semrush-one-headline" class="headline-responsive">
        If AI can’t find you, <span>customers won’t either</span>.
      </div>
      <p id="semrush-one-subhead">
       Track your visibility across AI search, uncover missed opportunities, and grow your presence where customers are asking questions.
      </p>
    </div>
    <div>
      <span id="semrush-one-cta">See your AI visibility</span>
    </div>
    </div>
    </a>



ChatGPT Ads has sent out an email to advertisers announcing new ChatGPT Ads Manager updates and ChatGPT Ads experience updates.  The updates include custom audiences, new overview tab, suggested ad drafts, as well as a refreshed ad card format and expanding ads in Japan and South Korea.
Here is what is new:
Custom audiences: Upload lists with 25K or more users to include or suppress audiences from campaigns. Bid multipliers can also be set for audiences at the ad group level. We covered this in more detail over here earlier this week.
Overview tab: You can monitor account health, review recommended tasks that can help improve campaign performance, and analyze key performance metrics in a larger, more flexible trend chart.
Suggested ad drafts: If your campaign could benefit from broader content coverage to optimize delivery, you may see the option to select ‘Add new ad’ in your campaign view. This feature uses existing website metadata to prefill an ad draft with an image, title, and description for you to review, edit, and assign to a campaign and ad group. It does not generate new copy or imagery with AI. We covered this in more detail over here earlier this week.
ChatGPT Ads are live in Japan and South Korea: Campaigns can now target users in Japan and South Korea, expanding reach for advertisers doing business in those markets.
Refreshed static ad card format: OpenAI is starting to roll out a refreshed static ad card format across web and mobile that is more compact and easier to read, with larger visual elements. This actually rolled out in late June. Here is the before and after:




Why we care. ChatGPT Ads are new, and OpenAI continues to add new features, expand to new markets and test new ad formats and treatements.
Make sure you stay on top of these changes, experiment and continue to fine-tune your ad creatives and campaigns. 
customers won’t either.
      
See your AI visibility

OpenAI also said ChatGPT Ads are live in Japan and South Korea.

ChatGPT Ads new overview tab, suggested ad drafts, new ad formats and more

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/ask-youtube.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Ask YouTube" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/ask-youtube.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/ask-youtube-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/ask-youtube-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/ask-youtube-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Signed-in U.S. viewers can now ask natural-language questions and get AI responses with videos, Shorts, and follow-up prompts.

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/ask-youtube.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Ask YouTube" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/ask-youtube.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/ask-youtube-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/ask-youtube-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/07/ask-youtube-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p>YouTube expanded Ask YouTube to signed-in U.S. desktop viewers 13 and older, moving its conversational search experience beyond a Premium-only test.</p>



<p><strong>What is Ask YouTube? </strong>Ask YouTube lets users type natural-language questions into the YouTube search bar and receive responses that combine text, video clips, long-form videos, and Shorts. Users can also ask follow-up questions to refine results.</p>



<p><strong>Access expands.</strong> When <a href="https://searchengineland.com/youtube-testing-new-search-experience-ask-youtube-475786">YouTube announced the test</a> in April, Ask YouTube was limited to U.S. YouTube Premium members 18 and older who opted in through youtube.com/new. On July 6, YouTube expanded it to signed-in U.S. viewers 13 and older using English-language searches on desktop.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Signed-out viewers and supervised accounts remain excluded.</li>



<li>YouTube said it will roll out the feature to more devices, languages, and users worldwide in the coming months.</li>
</ul>



<p id="h-regular-search-remains"><strong>YouTube standard Search isn&#8217;t going away.</strong> Users can switch back to traditional video results by clicking <em>All</em> on an Ask YouTube results page or by returning to the Home page. Ask YouTube remains a separate search option rather than a replacement for standard YouTube Search.</p>



<p id="h-regular-search-remains"><strong>Views count for creators. </strong>YouTube said videos featured in Ask YouTube responses give creators another way to be discovered.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Views from Shorts, videos, and previews shown in Ask YouTube responses count toward total view metrics and YouTube Partner Program eligibility. Featured videos also display the video title and channel name.</li>



<li>YouTube said creators can improve their chances of appearing by publishing unique, high-quality content with clear chapters and descriptive titles. Those signals help its systems match video segments to viewer questions.</li>
</ul>



<p id="h-why-we-care"><strong>Why we care. </strong>YouTube is putting conversational search in front of a much larger group of U.S. desktop users. Your videos may need clear titles, chapters, and segments that answer specific questions well enough to appear in Ask YouTube responses.</p>



<p id="h-why-we-care"><strong>What it looks like. </strong>Here&#8217;s a GIF of Ask YouTube in action:</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="800" height="450" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/04/ask-youtube-.gif" alt="" class="wp-image-475787" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/04/ask-youtube-.gif 800w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/04/ask-youtube--768x432.gif 768w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></figure>



<p id="h-why-we-care"><strong>The announcement.</strong> <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/448540943/try-a-new-conversational-search-experience-with-ask-youtube">Try a new conversational search experience with Ask YouTube</a>


<a href="https://www.semrush.com/ai-seo/overview?utm_campaign=ic_sel_0102ai&#038;utm_source=searchengineland.com&#038;utm_medium=overlay&#038;onboarding=off" target="_blank">
  <div>
    
    <div>
      
      <div id="semrush-one-headline" class="headline-responsive">
        If AI can’t find you, <span>customers won’t either</span>.
      </div>
      <p id="semrush-one-subhead">
       Track your visibility across AI search, uncover missed opportunities, and grow your presence where customers are asking questions.
      </p>
    </div>
    <div>
      <span id="semrush-one-cta">See your AI visibility</span>
    </div>
    </div>
    </a>



YouTube expanded Ask YouTube to signed-in U.S. desktop viewers 13 and older, moving its conversational search experience beyond a Premium-only test.
What is Ask YouTube? Ask YouTube lets users type natural-language questions into the YouTube search bar and receive responses that combine text, video clips, long-form videos, and Shorts. Users can also ask follow-up questions to refine results.
Access expands. When YouTube announced the test in April, Ask YouTube was limited to U.S. YouTube Premium members 18 and older who opted in through youtube.com/new. On July 6, YouTube expanded it to signed-in U.S. viewers 13 and older using English-language searches on desktop.
Signed-out viewers and supervised accounts remain excluded.
YouTube said it will roll out the feature to more devices, languages, and users worldwide in the coming months.
YouTube standard Search isn’t going away. Users can switch back to traditional video results by clicking All on an Ask YouTube results page or by returning to the Home page. Ask YouTube remains a separate search option rather than a replacement for standard YouTube Search.
Views count for creators. YouTube said videos featured in Ask YouTube responses give creators another way to be discovered.
Views from Shorts, videos, and previews shown in Ask YouTube responses count toward total view metrics and YouTube Partner Program eligibility. Featured videos also display the video title and channel name.
YouTube said creators can improve their chances of appearing by publishing unique, high-quality content with clear chapters and descriptive titles. Those signals help its systems match video segments to viewer questions.
Why we care. YouTube is putting conversational search in front of a much larger group of U.S. desktop users. Your videos may need clear titles, chapters, and segments that answer specific questions well enough to appear in Ask YouTube responses.
What it looks like. Here’s a GIF of Ask YouTube in action:




The announcement. Try a new conversational search experience with Ask YouTube



  
customers won’t either.
      
See your AI visibility

Signed-in U.S. viewers can now ask natural-language questions and get AI responses with videos, Shorts, and follow-up prompts.

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Read the Latest Trends and Headlines in Digital Marketing.

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