<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-protection-logo-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" fetchpriority="high" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-protection-logo-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-protection-logo-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-protection-logo-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Google said it deploys technical measures against evolving forms of abuse and this is one of those.

<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-protection-logo-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-protection-logo-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-protection-logo-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-protection-logo-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google has <a href="https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-goto-tracking-41957.html">confirmed</a> it is rolling out new &#8220;technical measures&#8221; to protect against abuse of its search results and protect its services.  Google is rolling out the addition of goto URL parameter redirects to the links in its search results.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What Google said.</strong> A Google spokesperson told us:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>&#8220;We have a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, and we regularly take steps to protect our services and users.&#8221;</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What changed. </strong>Previously, when you clicked on a search result, it would show the page&#8217;s full URL and take you to that URL. It looked like this:</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="1772" height="506" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-search-normal-urls-Qk4tixP2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-485928" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-search-normal-urls-Qk4tixP2.png 1772w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-search-normal-urls-Qk4tixP2-768x219.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-search-normal-urls-Qk4tixP2-1536x439.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1772px) 100vw, 1772px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The new technical measure to protect against abuse, adds a redirect hope to google.com/goto?url=[hashURL] and then takes you to the page.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="1628" height="510" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-goto-tracking-urls-FnMyqEa2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-485929" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-goto-tracking-urls-FnMyqEa2.png 1628w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-goto-tracking-urls-FnMyqEa2-768x241.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-goto-tracking-urls-FnMyqEa2-1536x481.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1628px) 100vw, 1628px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why is Google doing this. </strong>Google said it is doing this as a technical measure to protect against abuse of its search results and protect its services.  Technically, this should make it harder for third-party tools, services, scrapers, and AI engines to scrape the Google search results.   Such as companies like <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-sues-serpapi-466541">SerpAPI, which Google sued</a> over scraping and <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-loses-key-dmca-claims-against-serpapi-in-scraping-lawsuit-483185">lost</a> the latest motion.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>More details. </strong>Derek Perkins from Nozzle told me on <a href="https://x.com/Derek_Perkins/status/2092715097743556736">X</a> that Google has been pushing this change live and he sees it at &#8220;nearly a 100% rollout across several residential ip providers.&#8221; </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why we care. </strong>If you are using third-party Google Search tracking tools, those tools may be impacted in some way. Keep an eye on your data and what your tools are reporting. If something seems off in the coming days, maybe reach out to those tool providers to see if they have a plan.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google has been testing this for a <a href="https://www.seroundtable.com/google-com-goto-as-tracking-urls-41647.html">couple of months</a> now, and you have to assume that Google Search Console data is not impacted by this change. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">From a searcher&#8217;s perspective, this probably has almost no impact, outside of them not being able to preview the full URL in the browser bar before clicking. But Google does show the URL under the title of the snippet. But if there is some sort of hack or phishing exploit on the site, then it might cause some issues, although Google is generally pretty good at removing those pages from its search results pretty quickly.</p>


Google has confirmed it is rolling out new “technical measures” to protect against abuse of its search results and protect its services.  Google is rolling out the addition of goto URL parameter redirects to the links in its search results.
What Google said. A Google spokesperson told us:
“We have a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, and we regularly take steps to protect our services and users.”
What changed. Previously, when you clicked on a search result, it would show the page’s full URL and take you to that URL. It looked like this:




The new technical measure to protect against abuse, adds a redirect hope to google.com/goto?url=[hashURL] and then takes you to the page.




Why is Google doing this. Google said it is doing this as a technical measure to protect against abuse of its search results and protect its services.  Technically, this should make it harder for third-party tools, services, scrapers, and AI engines to scrape the Google search results.   Such as companies like SerpAPI, which Google sued over scraping and lost the latest motion.
More details. Derek Perkins from Nozzle told me on X that Google has been pushing this change live and he sees it at “nearly a 100% rollout across several residential ip providers.” 
Why we care. If you are using third-party Google Search tracking tools, those tools may be impacted in some way. Keep an eye on your data and what your tools are reporting. If something seems off in the coming days, maybe reach out to those tool providers to see if they have a plan.
Google has been testing this for a couple of months now, and you have to assume that Google Search Console data is not impacted by this change. 
From a searcher’s perspective, this probably has almost no impact, outside of them not being able to preview the full URL in the browser bar before clicking. But Google does show the URL under the title of the snippet. But if there is some sort of hack or phishing exploit on the site, then it might cause some issues, although Google is generally pretty good at removing those pages from its search results pretty quickly.

Google said it deploys technical measures against evolving forms of abuse and this is one of those.

Google confirms deploying goto URL redirects to search results links

<div><img width="1672" height="941" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-API-assisntant-dashboard.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-API-assisntant-dashboard.png 1672w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-API-assisntant-dashboard-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-API-assisntant-dashboard-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-API-assisntant-dashboard-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1672px) 100vw, 1672px" /></div>Google Ads API Developer Assistant v4.0.0 brings specialized API dev, troubleshooting and reporting tools into AI workflows.

<div><img width="1672" height="941" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-API-assisntant-dashboard.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-API-assisntant-dashboard.png 1672w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-API-assisntant-dashboard-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-API-assisntant-dashboard-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-API-assisntant-dashboard-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1672px) 100vw, 1672px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google released Google Ads API Developer Assistant v4.0.0, rebuilding the tool around a unified plugin architecture that brings specialized Google Ads API capabilities directly into AI coding workflows.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The major release adds support for Antigravity and Claude Code while promising faster performance, lower resource usage and more reliable Google Ads API development.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What’s new.</strong> The Developer Assistant is moving away from the standalone, local workspace project structure used in previous versions. Version 4.0.0 is instead installed as a globally available plugin, allowing its Google Ads-specific rules, skills and diagnostic commands to be used across multiple projects and development environments.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google says the new architecture is not compatible with previous releases.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>AI coding gets Google Ads expertise.</strong> The assistant is designed to bring specialized Google Ads knowledge into AI coding environments rather than relying entirely on what an underlying AI model already knows.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It can generate integration code across Python, Java, PHP, .NET and Ruby, with Google saying the output follows tested Google Ads API best practices.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It can also answer API questions using embedded architectural rules combined with local Protobuf schema inspection, grounding answers in API definitions and client library source code.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>GAQL validation.</strong> One of the more practical capabilities is automated validation of Google Ads Query Language queries.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The assistant can check GAQL syntax, field compatibility, date segmentation and zero-impression rules before a query is executed.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Instead of an AI model repeatedly attempting to diagnose a broken query over several interactions, Google says the local validator can check fields, resources, metrics and date clauses in a single step.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Ad hoc reporting.</strong> Developers can also request Google Ads performance data using natural language.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The assistant can construct and validate the necessary GAQL query, run it against the advertiser&#8217;s Google Ads account and return live results as formatted tables directly within the conversation.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Users can also ask it to save those results as a CSV for further analysis in a spreadsheet.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Troubleshooting gets conversational.</strong> The Developer Assistant can diagnose API problems including offline conversion upload failures, manager account hierarchy issues and Performance Max listing filters.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That means developers can ask broader questions such as which ads in an account have problems and how they could be fixed, rather than manually working through individual API errors.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Schema inspection.</strong> The assistant can inspect Protobuf schemas on demand to discover available resource fields, data types and enum definitions for active Google Ads API versions.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The aim is to make its guidance version-specific and reduce the risk of an AI assistant suggesting fields or configurations that aren&#8217;t valid for the API version being used.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>More AI environments.</strong> Version 4.0.0 introduces dual-platform support for <strong>Antigravity and Claude Code</strong>.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Claude Code integration includes custom slash commands for tasks such as validating GAQL, inspecting objects, troubleshooting conversions and retrieving customer IDs. Antigravity supports global and workspace plugin registration.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google is also providing unified installation scripts for Linux, macOS and Windows.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Performance improvements.</strong> Google says the new architecture reduces token consumption by loading only the rules and schemas needed for a particular task rather than supplying everything to the model upfront.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It also promises faster responses, lower CPU and memory usage, less disk I/O and zero daemon overhead while idle. API version and Protobuf schema information can also be cached to avoid unnecessary repeat lookups.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why we care.</strong> Google is moving its developer tooling closer to the AI agents developers are increasingly using to build and maintain advertising integrations. More importantly, the assistant isn&#8217;t just generating code: it&#8217;s validating queries against Google Ads-specific rules and inspecting actual schemas. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That could make AI-assisted API development more reliable and reduce the amount of time developers spend debugging hallucinated fields, invalid GAQL or version-specific problems.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Bottom line.</strong> <a href="https://ads-developers.googleblog.com/2026/08/google-ads-api-developer-assistant-v400.html">Google Ads API Developer Assistant v4.0.0</a> turns the tool into a reusable AI coding plugin capable of generating and validating code, troubleshooting integrations and querying live advertising data — while grounding more of that work in Google Ads&#8217; actual API definitions rather than relying solely on an AI model&#8217;s existing knowledge.</p>


Google released Google Ads API Developer Assistant v4.0.0, rebuilding the tool around a unified plugin architecture that brings specialized Google Ads API capabilities directly into AI coding workflows.
The major release adds support for Antigravity and Claude Code while promising faster performance, lower resource usage and more reliable Google Ads API development.
What’s new. The Developer Assistant is moving away from the standalone, local workspace project structure used in previous versions. Version 4.0.0 is instead installed as a globally available plugin, allowing its Google Ads-specific rules, skills and diagnostic commands to be used across multiple projects and development environments.
Google says the new architecture is not compatible with previous releases.
AI coding gets Google Ads expertise. The assistant is designed to bring specialized Google Ads knowledge into AI coding environments rather than relying entirely on what an underlying AI model already knows.
It can generate integration code across Python, Java, PHP, .NET and Ruby, with Google saying the output follows tested Google Ads API best practices.
It can also answer API questions using embedded architectural rules combined with local Protobuf schema inspection, grounding answers in API definitions and client library source code.
GAQL validation. One of the more practical capabilities is automated validation of Google Ads Query Language queries.
The assistant can check GAQL syntax, field compatibility, date segmentation and zero-impression rules before a query is executed.
Instead of an AI model repeatedly attempting to diagnose a broken query over several interactions, Google says the local validator can check fields, resources, metrics and date clauses in a single step.
Ad hoc reporting. Developers can also request Google Ads performance data using natural language.
The assistant can construct and validate the necessary GAQL query, run it against the advertiser’s Google Ads account and return live results as formatted tables directly within the conversation.
Users can also ask it to save those results as a CSV for further analysis in a spreadsheet.
Troubleshooting gets conversational. The Developer Assistant can diagnose API problems including offline conversion upload failures, manager account hierarchy issues and Performance Max listing filters.
That means developers can ask broader questions such as which ads in an account have problems and how they could be fixed, rather than manually working through individual API errors.
Schema inspection. The assistant can inspect Protobuf schemas on demand to discover available resource fields, data types and enum definitions for active Google Ads API versions.
The aim is to make its guidance version-specific and reduce the risk of an AI assistant suggesting fields or configurations that aren’t valid for the API version being used.
More AI environments. Version 4.0.0 introduces dual-platform support for Antigravity and Claude Code.
Claude Code integration includes custom slash commands for tasks such as validating GAQL, inspecting objects, troubleshooting conversions and retrieving customer IDs. Antigravity supports global and workspace plugin registration.
Google is also providing unified installation scripts for Linux, macOS and Windows.
Performance improvements. Google says the new architecture reduces token consumption by loading only the rules and schemas needed for a particular task rather than supplying everything to the model upfront.
It also promises faster responses, lower CPU and memory usage, less disk I/O and zero daemon overhead while idle. API version and Protobuf schema information can also be cached to avoid unnecessary repeat lookups.
Why we care. Google is moving its developer tooling closer to the AI agents developers are increasingly using to build and maintain advertising integrations. More importantly, the assistant isn’t just generating code: it’s validating queries against Google Ads-specific rules and inspecting actual schemas. 
That could make AI-assisted API development more reliable and reduce the amount of time developers spend debugging hallucinated fields, invalid GAQL or version-specific problems.
Bottom line. Google Ads API Developer Assistant v4.0.0 turns the tool into a reusable AI coding plugin capable of generating and validating code, troubleshooting integrations and querying live advertising data — while grounding more of that work in Google Ads’ actual API definitions rather than relying solely on an AI model’s existing knowledge.

Google Ads API Developer Assistant v4.0.0 brings specialized API dev, troubleshooting and reporting tools into AI workflows.

Google Ads API Developer Assistant gets major AI agent upgrade

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/The-SEO-blind-spot-is-what-happens-after-the-click.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="The SEO blind spot is what happens after the click" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/The-SEO-blind-spot-is-what-happens-after-the-click.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/The-SEO-blind-spot-is-what-happens-after-the-click-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/The-SEO-blind-spot-is-what-happens-after-the-click-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/The-SEO-blind-spot-is-what-happens-after-the-click-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Getting the click is only the first step. Here’s how to make SEO content help users move through the funnel and toward conversion.


<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/The-SEO-blind-spot-is-what-happens-after-the-click.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="The SEO blind spot is what happens after the click" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/The-SEO-blind-spot-is-what-happens-after-the-click.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/The-SEO-blind-spot-is-what-happens-after-the-click-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/The-SEO-blind-spot-is-what-happens-after-the-click-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/The-SEO-blind-spot-is-what-happens-after-the-click-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A few weeks ago, I spoke with a colleague about connecting <a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo">SEO</a> content to conversions. We agreed there’s a blind spot in SEO: getting people to the website has traditionally been treated as the goal, even as LLMs change how users find and enter websites. We’re seeing more branded traffic, less organic SERP traffic, and users entering at different stages of the funnel.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">My colleague called it “the SEO blind spot” because everything on a website should work together toward conversions and KPIs.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">When I first started in this industry, I was told to drive traffic to get people on the page. We wanted our traffic numbers to grow. After that, the sales team would take care of it.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That’s not the right strategy. I learned that the hard way, but hopefully you won’t have to.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Your SEO content should drive traffic, but it should be the right traffic — people with a strong chance of converting. It should work with the full funnel to drive traffic and support conversions.</p>



<h2 id="h-ai-overviews-changed-what-an-organic-click-is-worth" class="wp-block-heading">AI Overviews changed what an organic click is worth</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-zero-click-searches-2026-study-479717">Around 68%</a> of searches on traditional search engines yield no clicks, per a Semrush study. Think about that.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It’s now harder than ever to get traffic to the webpage. More and more, we’re not even seeing it come from the top of the funnel but rather as branded or direct traffic.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">This means SEO content has to be more intentional than ever, because if you get that click-through and the user doesn’t convert, it’s a waste of your hard work.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">There’s so much white noise on the internet today, so many products, so many things, that if you’re not standing out from your competitors and creating an experience for your user, chances are you’re drowning in the sea of sameness.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Even still, traffic alone rarely yields meaningful results for business KPIs. Conversions do.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/measuring-visibility-in-zero-click-world">Measuring zero-click search: Visibility-first SEO for AI results</a></em></strong>


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<h2 id="h-why-seo-can-t-stop-at-traffic" class="wp-block-heading">Why SEO can’t stop at traffic</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Job descriptions are changing. We’re seeing titles like content and growth engineers. These titles come with job descriptions that encompass SEO, CRO, sometimes AEO, and other E-I-E-I-Os. Organic growth for the SEO star used to mean just driving traffic to the website. Past that, it was someone else’s problem to make the sale. Not anymore.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">There are too many competitors in every industry to say, “Just grow our traffic numbers.” User experience and conversion rate optimization are being added to job descriptions more and more.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Both of those skills help a brand stand out and grow the business. As an SEO specialist, think about how to drive traffic with content and how to use that same content to support conversions.</p>



<h2 id="h-what-happens-when-you-create-traffic-but-not-conversions" class="wp-block-heading">What happens when you create traffic but not conversions?</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">You’ll see different trends and patterns across your content. It’ll be the usual suspects.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Vanity metrics rise, but revenue doesn’t.</li>



<li>Landing pages rank, but aren’t getting a decent CTR.</li>



<li>Time on page is low for well-ranking pages.</li>



<li>Visitors are landing, but not scrolling below the fold.</li>



<li>Blog traffic grows, but there’s no lift in visits to product, pricing, or services pages.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">You can find more trends through your analytics reports, heat maps, and more. When this happens, your customer or user isn’t moving through the funnel. They’re getting stalled because of your SEO content.</p>



<h2 id="h-what-happens-when-you-optimize-for-both" class="wp-block-heading">What happens when you optimize for both?</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">When you optimize for both traffic and conversions, you’re reconnecting the funnel and helping move the user smoothly through it. You’ll see some different, positive trends that you can report on and impress leadership with.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Demo/trial requests climb.</li>



<li>Return visitor rate goes up.</li>



<li>Branded search volume grows.</li>



<li>Assisted conversions show up in GA4.</li>



<li>Sales report more leads from organic growth.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">You can go back to those same reports and check to see what’s working and what’s not. You can use tools like SEOTesting.com or Convert.com to create A/B tests and see what’s driving your users. Now, instead of stalling the funnel, you’re actively helping move the user along toward the goal.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/new-seo-kpis">New SEO KPIs you’re missing: How to measure SEO beyond clicks</a></em></strong>



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<h2 id="h-seo-meets-user-experience-to-increase-conversions" class="wp-block-heading">SEO meets user experience to increase conversions</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">We’re seeing more and more that every user wants an experience. They don’t just want any company to provide them with a product or service. They want the company that shows it understands their problem, what it takes to make their life easier, and how it can do it better than anyone else.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">So, how do you take generic SEO content and turn it into epic content that drives conversions?</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Here are a few things to get you started.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Know your ideal customer profile (ICP). Talk to the sales teams, read reviews, and listen to calls. You’ll be surprised how much they talk about why they need this. The story behind it. You can take trending language and worries and put that right into your content.</li>



<li>Speak to the one. It’s an oldie but a goodie. Your SEO content should be a close-up for someone reading it. It should let them know that the brand sees them, understands their problem, and is the best choice to solve it. That means directly speaking to the one to make them feel seen rather than lost in the masses.</li>



<li>Make the next step obvious and easy. Use clear CTAs. Repeat them at logical points throughout the page. If they have to scroll to find how to act, whether up or down, you’ve most likely lost them.</li>



<li>Cut the friction. This can be both in the content, such as using jargon or inflated language, and forms. Simplify what you can. Most people don’t want academic reports unless they’re in that industry.</li>



<li>Structure content so users can act without reading everything. Eye fatigue is real, and so is the short attention span. Make your content scannable so they can find a context clue that leads them to what they need. Scannable headers. TL;DR at the top, etc. Sure, some people read long landing pages, but most just want to know you can solve their problem and how to take the next step.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">These are just a few steps. Depending on what your ICP needs, you have to do the research to figure out how to make your SEO content work to solve that problem. That’s where knowing a little bit about A/B testing will come in useful.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I highly recommend learning the basics of CRO. Talia Wolf (GetUplift), Joanna Wiebe (CopyHackers), and Steve Toth (CXL) are all great places to start when it comes to that.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/seo-visibility-systems-469169">SEO leaders: stop chasing rankings, start building visibility systems</a></em></strong>



<h2 id="h-make-seo-accountable-for-more-than-traffic" class="wp-block-heading">Make SEO accountable for more than traffic</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">SEO is leaning more and more into search experience optimization. This combines SEO and CRO to make sure that every user coming to the page has the experience they need to take the next step in the funnel.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If your SEO content brings traffic but has a full stop on anything after that, leadership may not find your role valuable.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If your SEO content truly understands the user, their needs, and what will drive them to take that next action, well, now you’ve gone from just having people click through to the page to clicking where it counts — that next step toward conversion.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">When leadership or your clients see that you’re able to move the KPI needle, you’re helping the business succeed. That makes you a much more valuable SEO marketer than one who stops at just trying to drive traffic.</p>

A few weeks ago, I spoke with a colleague about connecting SEO content to conversions. We agreed there’s a blind spot in SEO: getting people to the website has traditionally been treated as the goal, even as LLMs change how users find and enter websites. We’re seeing more branded traffic, less organic SERP traffic, and users entering at different stages of the funnel.
My colleague called it “the SEO blind spot” because everything on a website should work together toward conversions and KPIs.
When I first started in this industry, I was told to drive traffic to get people on the page. We wanted our traffic numbers to grow. After that, the sales team would take care of it.
That’s not the right strategy. I learned that the hard way, but hopefully you won’t have to.
Your SEO content should drive traffic, but it should be the right traffic — people with a strong chance of converting. It should work with the full funnel to drive traffic and support conversions.
AI Overviews changed what an organic click is worth
Around 68% of searches on traditional search engines yield no clicks, per a Semrush study. Think about that.
It’s now harder than ever to get traffic to the webpage. More and more, we’re not even seeing it come from the top of the funnel but rather as branded or direct traffic.
This means SEO content has to be more intentional than ever, because if you get that click-through and the user doesn’t convert, it’s a waste of your hard work.
There’s so much white noise on the internet today, so many products, so many things, that if you’re not standing out from your competitors and creating an experience for your user, chances are you’re drowning in the sea of sameness.
Even still, traffic alone rarely yields meaningful results for business KPIs. Conversions do.
Dig deeper: Measuring zero-click search: Visibility-first SEO for AI results



  
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Why SEO can’t stop at traffic
Job descriptions are changing. We’re seeing titles like content and growth engineers. These titles come with job descriptions that encompass SEO, CRO, sometimes AEO, and other E-I-E-I-Os. Organic growth for the SEO star used to mean just driving traffic to the website. Past that, it was someone else’s problem to make the sale. Not anymore.
There are too many competitors in every industry to say, “Just grow our traffic numbers.” User experience and conversion rate optimization are being added to job descriptions more and more.
Both of those skills help a brand stand out and grow the business. As an SEO specialist, think about how to drive traffic with content and how to use that same content to support conversions.
What happens when you create traffic but not conversions?
You’ll see different trends and patterns across your content. It’ll be the usual suspects.
Vanity metrics rise, but revenue doesn’t.
Landing pages rank, but aren’t getting a decent CTR.
Time on page is low for well-ranking pages.
Visitors are landing, but not scrolling below the fold.
Blog traffic grows, but there’s no lift in visits to product, pricing, or services pages.
You can find more trends through your analytics reports, heat maps, and more. When this happens, your customer or user isn’t moving through the funnel. They’re getting stalled because of your SEO content.
What happens when you optimize for both?
When you optimize for both traffic and conversions, you’re reconnecting the funnel and helping move the user smoothly through it. You’ll see some different, positive trends that you can report on and impress leadership with.
Demo/trial requests climb.
Return visitor rate goes up.
Branded search volume grows.
Assisted conversions show up in GA4.
Sales report more leads from organic growth.
You can go back to those same reports and check to see what’s working and what’s not. You can use tools like SEOTesting.com or Convert.com to create A/B tests and see what’s driving your users. Now, instead of stalling the funnel, you’re actively helping move the user along toward the goal.
Dig deeper: New SEO KPIs you’re missing: How to measure SEO beyond clicks




	
	
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SEO meets user experience to increase conversions
We’re seeing more and more that every user wants an experience. They don’t just want any company to provide them with a product or service. They want the company that shows it understands their problem, what it takes to make their life easier, and how it can do it better than anyone else.
So, how do you take generic SEO content and turn it into epic content that drives conversions?
Here are a few things to get you started.
Know your ideal customer profile (ICP). Talk to the sales teams, read reviews, and listen to calls. You’ll be surprised how much they talk about why they need this. The story behind it. You can take trending language and worries and put that right into your content.
Speak to the one. It’s an oldie but a goodie. Your SEO content should be a close-up for someone reading it. It should let them know that the brand sees them, understands their problem, and is the best choice to solve it. That means directly speaking to the one to make them feel seen rather than lost in the masses.
Make the next step obvious and easy. Use clear CTAs. Repeat them at logical points throughout the page. If they have to scroll to find how to act, whether up or down, you’ve most likely lost them.
Cut the friction. This can be both in the content, such as using jargon or inflated language, and forms. Simplify what you can. Most people don’t want academic reports unless they’re in that industry.
Structure content so users can act without reading everything. Eye fatigue is real, and so is the short attention span. Make your content scannable so they can find a context clue that leads them to what they need. Scannable headers. TL;DR at the top, etc. Sure, some people read long landing pages, but most just want to know you can solve their problem and how to take the next step.
These are just a few steps. Depending on what your ICP needs, you have to do the research to figure out how to make your SEO content work to solve that problem. That’s where knowing a little bit about A/B testing will come in useful.
I highly recommend learning the basics of CRO. Talia Wolf (GetUplift), Joanna Wiebe (CopyHackers), and Steve Toth (CXL) are all great places to start when it comes to that.
Dig deeper: SEO leaders: stop chasing rankings, start building visibility systems



Make SEO accountable for more than traffic
SEO is leaning more and more into search experience optimization. This combines SEO and CRO to make sure that every user coming to the page has the experience they need to take the next step in the funnel.
If your SEO content brings traffic but has a full stop on anything after that, leadership may not find your role valuable.
If your SEO content truly understands the user, their needs, and what will drive them to take that next action, well, now you’ve gone from just having people click through to the page to clicking where it counts — that next step toward conversion.
When leadership or your clients see that you’re able to move the KPI needle, you’re helping the business succeed. That makes you a much more valuable SEO marketer than one who stops at just trying to drive traffic.

Getting the click is only the first step. Here’s how to make SEO content help users move through the funnel and toward conversion.

The SEO blind spot is what happens after the click

<div><img width="1672" height="941" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-AI-product-report.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-AI-product-report.png 1672w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-AI-product-report-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-AI-product-report-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-AI-product-report-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1672px) 100vw, 1672px" /></div>Google’s new Product titles report shows advertisers which AI-generated product titles are being served and how they perform.

<div><img width="1672" height="941" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-AI-product-report.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-AI-product-report.png 1672w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-AI-product-report-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-AI-product-report-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-AI-product-report-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1672px) 100vw, 1672px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google is giving advertisers more visibility into how AI is changing their Shopping ads, with a new Product titles report beginning to appear in Google Ads.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google AI can now generate customized product titles and show them in ads when it determines that its generated title is more relevant than the advertiser&#8217;s original version.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What’s new.</strong> Rather than always displaying the product title provided by the advertiser, Google can create an alternative title using AI.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The original product title hasn&#8217;t disappeared. Google can still serve it when it considers the advertiser-provided version more relevant.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why we care.</strong> Product titles are another area where Google AI can influence the message customers see, reducing the certainty advertisers have over exactly how their products are presented. The new report at least provides visibility into those changes, allowing advertisers to see what Google&#8217;s AI is generating and compare performance against their original titles.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>The new report.</strong> Advertisers are getting visibility into the titles Google&#8217;s AI is actually creating and serving. The Product titles report can show the customized product title generated by Google AI alongside the advertiser&#8217;s original product title.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Performance data.</strong> Advertisers can also evaluate how those customized titles perform. The report includes impressions, product clicks, CTR, cost and average CPC, providing performance data alongside the original and AI-generated versions.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why this matters.</strong> Google has already been giving AI more influence over advertising copy. Now AI-generated customization is becoming more visible within product titles in Shopping campaigns. That means the product title an advertiser provides isn&#8217;t necessarily the title a potential customer will see.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>More visibility into automation.</strong> The notable part of the update is that Google isn&#8217;t leaving advertisers completely in the dark about what its AI generates.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Advertisers can see the customized titles being served and assess their performance rather than simply knowing that Google may have altered the messaging.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Bottom line.</strong> Google AI can now customize product titles when it believes an alternative is more relevant, while the new Product titles report gives advertisers a clearer view of what those AI-generated titles are and how they perform.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>First spotted.</strong> This update was spotted by Performance marketer &#8211; Yash Mandlesha, who shared spotting the update on<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/yash-mandlesha/"> LinkedIn</a>. </p>


Google is giving advertisers more visibility into how AI is changing their Shopping ads, with a new Product titles report beginning to appear in Google Ads.
Google AI can now generate customized product titles and show them in ads when it determines that its generated title is more relevant than the advertiser’s original version.
What’s new. Rather than always displaying the product title provided by the advertiser, Google can create an alternative title using AI.
The original product title hasn’t disappeared. Google can still serve it when it considers the advertiser-provided version more relevant.
Why we care. Product titles are another area where Google AI can influence the message customers see, reducing the certainty advertisers have over exactly how their products are presented. The new report at least provides visibility into those changes, allowing advertisers to see what Google’s AI is generating and compare performance against their original titles.
The new report. Advertisers are getting visibility into the titles Google’s AI is actually creating and serving. The Product titles report can show the customized product title generated by Google AI alongside the advertiser’s original product title.
Performance data. Advertisers can also evaluate how those customized titles perform. The report includes impressions, product clicks, CTR, cost and average CPC, providing performance data alongside the original and AI-generated versions.
Why this matters. Google has already been giving AI more influence over advertising copy. Now AI-generated customization is becoming more visible within product titles in Shopping campaigns. That means the product title an advertiser provides isn’t necessarily the title a potential customer will see.
More visibility into automation. The notable part of the update is that Google isn’t leaving advertisers completely in the dark about what its AI generates.
Advertisers can see the customized titles being served and assess their performance rather than simply knowing that Google may have altered the messaging.
Bottom line. Google AI can now customize product titles when it believes an alternative is more relevant, while the new Product titles report gives advertisers a clearer view of what those AI-generated titles are and how they perform.
First spotted. This update was spotted by Performance marketer – Yash Mandlesha, who shared spotting the update on LinkedIn.

Google’s new Product titles report shows advertisers which AI-generated product titles are being served and how they perform.

Google Ads adds reporting for AI-generated product titles

<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/google-ai-boxes-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/google-ai-boxes-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/google-ai-boxes-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/google-ai-boxes-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>This is after Google has already added these link carousels for AI Overviews in Google Search.

<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/google-ai-boxes-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/google-ai-boxes-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/google-ai-boxes-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/05/google-ai-boxes-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google is rolling out link carousels for developing topics, like top stories, for AI Mode after adding this feature for AI Overviews within Google Search <a href="https://searchengineland.com/top-stories-roll-out-in-google-ai-overviews-482615">earlier</a>.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What it looks like. </strong>Here is a screenshot of these link carousels within the AI Mode results:</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="2017" height="2048" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-ai-mode-link-carousels-scaled.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-485885" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-ai-mode-link-carousels-scaled.jpg 2017w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-ai-mode-link-carousels-768x780.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-ai-mode-link-carousels-1513x1536.jpg 1513w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-ai-mode-link-carousels-95x95.jpg 95w" sizes="(max-width: 2017px) 100vw, 2017px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>More clickable. </strong>This should make the AI Mode results more click-friendly, meaning, it should lead to more clicks than you saw before from AI Mode. Of course, it is hard to know how many clicks you received from AI Mode because Google does not report on click data in Search Console&#8217;s generative AI reports.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">And, of course, the clicks won&#8217;t be as high as they were before Google added AI Overviews or AI Mode to Google Search. But it should help increase the clicks you get from AI Mode, nevertheless. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What Google said. </strong>Robby Stein from Google <a href="https://x.com/rmstein/status/2092282973341245839">said</a>:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>&#8220;Now live in AI Mode (already in AI Overviews): link carousels for developing topics. Ask about something that&#8217;s trending and you’ll see links to relevant articles, webpages (incl your Preferred Sources) front &amp; center.&#8221;</li>



<li>&#8220;Our goal with AI Search is to make it easy to connect with original coverage and a range of perspectives.&#8221;</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why we care. </strong>While this is an improvement in the clickability of links within AI Mode, you should not expect to see the same level of clicks you received from Google Search pre-AI search integration.  Clicks from the pre-AI days are gone and we need to adapt to this new world of fewer clicks and more just searchers reading, maybe doing a follow up query, and then leaving Google Search.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Of course, we can be hopeful that Google will add even more clickable elements to Google&#8217;s AI search features.</p>


Google is rolling out link carousels for developing topics, like top stories, for AI Mode after adding this feature for AI Overviews within Google Search earlier.
What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of these link carousels within the AI Mode results:




More clickable. This should make the AI Mode results more click-friendly, meaning, it should lead to more clicks than you saw before from AI Mode. Of course, it is hard to know how many clicks you received from AI Mode because Google does not report on click data in Search Console’s generative AI reports.
And, of course, the clicks won’t be as high as they were before Google added AI Overviews or AI Mode to Google Search. But it should help increase the clicks you get from AI Mode, nevertheless. 
What Google said. Robby Stein from Google said:
“Now live in AI Mode (already in AI Overviews): link carousels for developing topics. Ask about something that’s trending and you’ll see links to relevant articles, webpages (incl your Preferred Sources) front & center.”
“Our goal with AI Search is to make it easy to connect with original coverage and a range of perspectives.”
Why we care. While this is an improvement in the clickability of links within AI Mode, you should not expect to see the same level of clicks you received from Google Search pre-AI search integration.  Clicks from the pre-AI days are gone and we need to adapt to this new world of fewer clicks and more just searchers reading, maybe doing a follow up query, and then leaving Google Search.
Of course, we can be hopeful that Google will add even more clickable elements to Google’s AI search features.

This is after Google has already added these link carousels for AI Overviews in Google Search.

Google adds link carousels for developing topics in AI Mode

<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/02/google-algo-discover-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/02/google-algo-discover-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/02/google-algo-discover-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/02/google-algo-discover-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>A single Google Careers listing sheds rare light on Discover's recommendation system, reinforcing research into candidate selection and user affinity.

<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/02/google-algo-discover-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/02/google-algo-discover-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/02/google-algo-discover-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/02/google-algo-discover-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google rarely explains how <a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-google-discover">Discover</a> really works. But sometimes it reveals more than intended—in a job posting.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google recently listed a role for a <a href="https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/100963338174767814-staff-software-engineer-discover-ranking">Staff Software Engineer, Discover Ranking</a> in Mountain View. One line in the minimum qualifications stands out:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>“5 years of experience building and deploying recommendation systems models (retrieval, prediction, ranking, embedding) in production”</li>
</ul>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="827" height="488" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/job_posting_capture_highlight.png" alt="" class="wp-image-485881" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/job_posting_capture_highlight.png 827w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/job_posting_capture_highlight-768x453.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 827px) 100vw, 827px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><em>The “Staff Software Engineer, Discover Ranking” posting on Google Careers, with retrieval, prediction, ranking, and embedding highlighted in the minimum qualifications</em>. <em>The four words sit together in the minimum qualifications of Google’s </em><a href="https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/100963338174767814-staff-software-engineer-discover-ranking" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>Discover Ranking posting</em></a><em> (Google Careers, Mountain View). Highlight added by us.</em>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Four words: retrieval, prediction, ranking, embedding.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A job posting describes a skill set. Nothing more. Its value is in the overlap.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">We&#8217;ve monitored real Discover feeds for two years — 42 million cards and counting. Three of those four words match layers we&#8217;ve already traced from the outside. Here&#8217;s what that looks like, brick by brick.</p>



<h2 id="h-retrieval-the-candidate-layer-has-visible-seams" class="wp-block-heading">Retrieval: the candidate layer has visible seams</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Before anything gets ranked, the system has to decide which articles and videos are even eligible for your feed. We&#8217;ve <a href="https://searchengineland.com/inside-google-discover-pipelines-cards-473984">mapped about 20 pipelines that feed Discover</a> (<a href="https://1492.vision/research/r2-discover-pipelines-en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">full study</a>), and several include &#8220;retrieval&#8221; in their internal names: </p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>A candidate sampling pipeline dominated by diversified editorial content.</li>



<li>A post-retrieval evaluation pipeline made up almost entirely of YouTube and X content.</li>



<li>Cluster-profile retrieval variants.</li>



<li>A trend-embedding retrieval channel.</li>



<li>Item-item collaborative filtering.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">One number is worth remembering: a <strong>generative retrieval</strong> channel appeared as early as September 2025 in roughly <strong>0.03% of the French Discover feed</strong>. That&#8217;s consistent with Google testing LLM-driven candidate selection on a tiny slice before any broader rollout.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The pipeline name is often the only evidence we have, so its exact role remains a matter of interpretation. But the layer itself is unmistakably there.</p>



<h2 id="h-prediction-the-scores-behave-like-the-job-posting-says-they-should" class="wp-block-heading">Prediction: the scores behave like the job posting says they should</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Every Discover card we observe carries a set of prediction scores — probabilities between 0 and 1. We&#8217;ve isolated about nine of them, and they collapse into <strong>two nearly independent dimensions</strong>: </p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>An <em>attention</em> axis (will the user stop on this card? — mostly a property of the article).</li>



<li>An <em>engagement</em> axis (will this specific user click and read deeply? — a property of the user-content pair).</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The correlation between the two is close to zero. A headline can grab attention without holding it—the clickbait pattern in one sentence.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">These scores track real behavior. In our panel measurements, observed interaction roughly <strong>doubles</strong> from the bottom to the top of the deep-engagement score scale, while steadily declining as the &#8220;scroll-past&#8221; score rises.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In other words, Google&#8217;s predictions closely match the behavior we later observe.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The biggest effects we measure come from personalization.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">On our test accounts, we compared two sports publishers in the same vertical with nearly identical topic potential. One received deep-engagement predictions about <strong>2x higher</strong> and final amplification roughly <strong>8x stronger</strong>.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The striking detail is that the dominant publisher is the one <strong>fewer of our panel accounts follow</strong> through Google&#8217;s Follow feature. That suggests amplification is driven primarily by the affinity the model has already learned between readers and the source — beyond the topic itself and beyond the explicit follow.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A mirror test on a single tech publisher completes the picture. Accounts that follow it receive deep-engagement predictions nearly <strong>2x higher</strong> than those of accounts that don&#8217;t, indicating the Follow button serves as one signal among several that shape that affinity.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A U.S. replication (ESPN vs. the NFL&#8217;s official site, NFL.com) shows the same pattern with a smaller gap: <strong>1.28x amplification</strong>. (These are small samples; the full methodology and charts are in the <a href="https://1492.vision/research/discover-prediction-embedding-en?lng=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">complete study</a>.)</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="1574" height="702" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/publisher_comparison_fr_case_en.png" alt="" class="wp-image-485882" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/publisher_comparison_fr_case_en.png 1574w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/publisher_comparison_fr_case_en-768x343.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/publisher_comparison_fr_case_en-1536x685.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1574px) 100vw, 1574px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><em>Two sports publishers at nearly identical topic potential: the one the model predicts more engaging gets deep-engagement scores about 2x higher and roughly 8x more amplification</em>. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">On our test accounts, two French sports publishers (L’Équipe and FootMercato) at nearly equal topic potential. The one the model predicts more engaging gets deep-engagement scores about 2x higher and final amplification on the order of 8x, even though our panel accounts follow it less. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Small sample, an illustration rather than a general proof.</p>



<h2 id="h-embedding-several-named-families-per-user" class="wp-block-heading">Embedding: several named families per user</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">To retrieve candidates and generate predictions, the system needs compact representations of users and content.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">What we observe suggests Google maintains <strong>several named embedding families per user</strong>, each operating over a different time window: </p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Discover interests (including a short-term variant).</li>



<li>A trends-oriented family.</li>



<li>A real-time family.</li>



<li>A shopping-related family that also appears behind AI summary cards in finance and tech news.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">These vectors appear to feed a classic two-tower retrieval system: one tower for the user, one for the content, with recommendations driven by proximity in a shared vector space. The names are observed; the roles are our interpretation.</p>



<h2 id="h-what-this-means-for-publishers" class="wp-block-heading">What this means for publishers</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The job posting validates the vocabulary. The feed shows the machinery at work. Three practical takeaways:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Reader affinity is a direct distribution lever.</strong> At equal topic potential, the affinity the model has learned between readers and a source increased amplification by roughly <strong>8x</strong> in our tests. It outweighed the explicit Follow signal, which appears to be just one input among several.</li>



<li><strong>Attention and engagement are separate diagnostics.</strong> They vary almost independently. Improving one doesn&#8217;t necessarily improve the other.</li>



<li><strong>Engagement is only half the story.</strong> The posting itself says &#8220;more engaging, and useful.&#8221; Usefulness appears to depend on signals beyond the prediction scores we&#8217;ve identified.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google&#8217;s job posting names the four building blocks of its recommendation system. Three already leave measurable traces in real Discover feeds. The fourth — ranking — reveals itself every morning in what your readers see, or never see.</p>


Google rarely explains how Discover really works. But sometimes it reveals more than intended—in a job posting.
Google recently listed a role for a Staff Software Engineer, Discover Ranking in Mountain View. One line in the minimum qualifications stands out:
“5 years of experience building and deploying recommendation systems models (retrieval, prediction, ranking, embedding) in production”




The “Staff Software Engineer, Discover Ranking” posting on Google Careers, with retrieval, prediction, ranking, and embedding highlighted in the minimum qualifications. The four words sit together in the minimum qualifications of Google’s Discover Ranking posting (Google Careers, Mountain View). Highlight added by us.



Four words: retrieval, prediction, ranking, embedding.
A job posting describes a skill set. Nothing more. Its value is in the overlap.
We’ve monitored real Discover feeds for two years — 42 million cards and counting. Three of those four words match layers we’ve already traced from the outside. Here’s what that looks like, brick by brick.
Retrieval: the candidate layer has visible seams
Before anything gets ranked, the system has to decide which articles and videos are even eligible for your feed. We’ve mapped about 20 pipelines that feed Discover (full study), and several include “retrieval” in their internal names: 
A candidate sampling pipeline dominated by diversified editorial content.
A post-retrieval evaluation pipeline made up almost entirely of YouTube and X content.
Cluster-profile retrieval variants.
A trend-embedding retrieval channel.
Item-item collaborative filtering.
One number is worth remembering: a generative retrieval channel appeared as early as September 2025 in roughly 0.03% of the French Discover feed. That’s consistent with Google testing LLM-driven candidate selection on a tiny slice before any broader rollout.
The pipeline name is often the only evidence we have, so its exact role remains a matter of interpretation. But the layer itself is unmistakably there.
Prediction: the scores behave like the job posting says they should
Every Discover card we observe carries a set of prediction scores — probabilities between 0 and 1. We’ve isolated about nine of them, and they collapse into two nearly independent dimensions: 
An attention axis (will the user stop on this card? — mostly a property of the article).
An engagement axis (will this specific user click and read deeply? — a property of the user-content pair).
The correlation between the two is close to zero. A headline can grab attention without holding it—the clickbait pattern in one sentence.
These scores track real behavior. In our panel measurements, observed interaction roughly doubles from the bottom to the top of the deep-engagement score scale, while steadily declining as the “scroll-past” score rises.
In other words, Google’s predictions closely match the behavior we later observe.
The biggest effects we measure come from personalization.
On our test accounts, we compared two sports publishers in the same vertical with nearly identical topic potential. One received deep-engagement predictions about 2x higher and final amplification roughly 8x stronger.
The striking detail is that the dominant publisher is the one fewer of our panel accounts follow through Google’s Follow feature. That suggests amplification is driven primarily by the affinity the model has already learned between readers and the source — beyond the topic itself and beyond the explicit follow.
A mirror test on a single tech publisher completes the picture. Accounts that follow it receive deep-engagement predictions nearly 2x higher than those of accounts that don’t, indicating the Follow button serves as one signal among several that shape that affinity.
A U.S. replication (ESPN vs. the NFL’s official site, NFL.com) shows the same pattern with a smaller gap: 1.28x amplification. (These are small samples; the full methodology and charts are in the complete study.)




Two sports publishers at nearly identical topic potential: the one the model predicts more engaging gets deep-engagement scores about 2x higher and roughly 8x more amplification. 
On our test accounts, two French sports publishers (L’Équipe and FootMercato) at nearly equal topic potential. The one the model predicts more engaging gets deep-engagement scores about 2x higher and final amplification on the order of 8x, even though our panel accounts follow it less. 
Small sample, an illustration rather than a general proof.
Embedding: several named families per user
To retrieve candidates and generate predictions, the system needs compact representations of users and content.
What we observe suggests Google maintains several named embedding families per user, each operating over a different time window: 
Discover interests (including a short-term variant).
A trends-oriented family.
A real-time family.
A shopping-related family that also appears behind AI summary cards in finance and tech news.
These vectors appear to feed a classic two-tower retrieval system: one tower for the user, one for the content, with recommendations driven by proximity in a shared vector space. The names are observed; the roles are our interpretation.
What this means for publishers
The job posting validates the vocabulary. The feed shows the machinery at work. Three practical takeaways:
Reader affinity is a direct distribution lever. At equal topic potential, the affinity the model has learned between readers and a source increased amplification by roughly 8x in our tests. It outweighed the explicit Follow signal, which appears to be just one input among several.
Attention and engagement are separate diagnostics. They vary almost independently. Improving one doesn’t necessarily improve the other.
Engagement is only half the story. The posting itself says “more engaging, and useful.” Usefulness appears to depend on signals beyond the prediction scores we’ve identified.
Google’s job posting names the four building blocks of its recommendation system. Three already leave measurable traces in real Discover feeds. The fourth — ranking — reveals itself every morning in what your readers see, or never see.

A single Google Careers listing sheds rare light on Discover's recommendation system, reinforcing research into candidate selection and user affinity.

Google’s Discover job posting confirms what the feed already shows

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Is-top-of-funnel-content-still-worth-it-in-2027.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Is top-of-funnel content still worth it in 2027?" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Is-top-of-funnel-content-still-worth-it-in-2027.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Is-top-of-funnel-content-still-worth-it-in-2027-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Is-top-of-funnel-content-still-worth-it-in-2027-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Is-top-of-funnel-content-still-worth-it-in-2027-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>New traffic data shows a widening divide between YMYL and B2B tech — and points to the TOFU strategies most likely to work next.


Organic search clicks have fallen 42% since AI Overviews began expanding in Google Search, while LLMs continue to fully answer users’ informational queries in-platform. At the same time, AI content production has allowed publishers to flood SERPs with top-of-funnel (TOFU) articles at scale — meaning competition for blue links has gone up, even as available clicks have decreased.
Considering these factors, there’s a real question for content marketers: Is top-of-funnel content still driving traffic in any way that justifies writing it?
What happened to TOFU traffic over the past year
To get a high-level read on how top-of-funnel content is trending, I pulled Semrush’s organic traffic estimates for August 2026 and compared them to the same month a year earlier across 30 of the largest digital publishers spanning nine industries.
While third-party or panel-based data aren’t ideal for measuring precise traffic totals, they’re useful for getting a sense of general trends — which is exactly what we’re looking for here. Some of my sample domains included:
Cloud/DevOps/IT: aws.amazon.com, ibm.com
Consumer tech: howtogeek.com, pcmag.com
Cybersecurity: crowdstrike.com, paloaltonetworks.com
Data/CX SaaS: qualtrics.com, mailchimp.com
Fintech/finance: investopedia.com, nerdwallet.com
Healthcare: mayoclinic.org, healthline.com
HR/people ops: bamboohr.com, gusto.com
Legal: legalzoom.com, nolo.com
Marketing/sales/SaaS: hubspot.com, salesforce.com
For each domain, I tracked URL performance year over year, then grouped pages into a rough TOFU estimate: any pages ranking for keywords that include “what is…” and “how to…”, plus any pages that include “guide” in their URLs.
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YoY TOFU trends: YMYL declined, B2B tech improved
Across this sample of major publishers’ TOFU content, every domain in finance, healthcare, legal, and consumer tech publishing lost traffic over the past year. This includes glossary entries, “how to” articles, and guides — all declining in performance together.
Unsurprisingly, this pattern aligns with Google’s Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) categories, where AI Overviews show up most aggressively. These are the categories where Google assumes users want a fast, authoritative answer and don’t necessarily need to click through.
While this sample only reviews a top hierarchy of publishers, the industry trends certainly stand out. Even Legalzoom.com, whose sharp 90% YoY decline in TOFU content was an outlier, directly attributed its loss in traffic to changing patterns in Google Search, rather than any internal or site changes.
However, it wasn’t all bad for TOFU content. Every domain in cybersecurity and marketing/sales software improved during this window. Collectively, cloud infrastructure also ended up positive.
Comparing top-of-funnel to middle-of-funnel
But are these TOFU-specific patterns, or are they happening across the whole funnel? 
I compared the same industries against other common standard markers of middle-of-funnel (MOFU) content — service/product comparison pages ranking for “vs.” and “best” keywords — to see if the funnel stage made a difference within a given industry.




The patterns were remarkably similar. In this sample of 30 of the web’s top publishers, TOFU and MOFU have been trending together in the same direction, either up or down.
4 major takeaways from YoY TOFU/MOFU trends
1. In 2026, success largely depended on industry
Curiously, TOFU and MOFU tracked similarly in every industry reviewed, meaning the funnel stage of a content strategy may matter less than industry and the audience a company serves.
2. TOFU in B2B tech is still a reliable strategy
The data suggest top-of-funnel content can remain a valuable strategy in certain B2B tech industries. It makes sense, since a B2B buyer researching a platform migration or a security vendor may spend more time with a topic and place more weight on demonstrated expertise than YMYL consumers looking up symptoms or a tax rate. Because B2B decisions often involve larger budgets and more consideration, users’ research will go deeper than a single AI Overview can satisfy.
And beyond AI Overviews — even for LLMs, B2B software and infrastructure topics may move fast enough that their training data can’t reliably keep up. When an LLM doesn’t already have the answer, it has more reason to search and cite the page that does, hopefully still encouraging a user click.
3. For YMYL companies, a turn to MOFU may not help
If there’s little difference between the top- and middle-of-funnel performance within an industry, a YMYL brand cutting TOFU budget in favor of MOFU content won’t sidestep the negative impact of AI Overviews and other forms of AI search.
4. YMYL decline likely goes beyond major publishers
If the YMYL decline held for the largest, most authoritative publishers, that’s a bad sign for smaller publishers. Research on AI Overview citations in YMYL topics shows Google’s summaries lean almost entirely on a small set of established domains (Mayo Clinic in health, Investopedia in finance, etc.).
If dominating AI Overview citations isn’t enough to protect the biggest names in YMYL industries, it’s hard to imagine smaller publishers, competing for a thinner slice of SERPs, are faring much better.
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Effective TOFU content strategies in 2027
Past success or challenges don’t guarantee future performance — positive or negative — especially for SEO in the tumultuous 2020s. But certain trends are worth noting. Beyond industry, several high-level TOFU strategies appear promising for success in the coming year.
Local search that appeals to local needs
Recent studies have shown promising consistency for local search traffic. They note that, since LLMs still lack reliable location awareness and Google’s AI Overviews appear far less often for local queries, site posts still play a significant role in the local search user experience.
Even so, in 2027, an ideal local SEO strategy will likely go beyond programmatic location pages to provide helpful, meaningful content tailored to the unique needs and interests of each service area.
TOFU digital tools
Interactive tools also seem promising. My recent Search Engine Land analysis comparing organic and LLM-referred traffic found that plain educational how-to content (a classic TOFU format) gets cited by LLMs only about 12% of the time. Since LLMs and AI Overviews are already good at writing generic how-to content, they give little reason to send anyone to read yours.
However, ungated online tools, like specialized industry calculators and screeners, are a different story. In that study, nearly every tool page picked up at least some AI Search traffic, and summaries recommended a specific tool by name when asked for an assessment or evaluation.
Tools are one of the few TOFU formats that AI summaries can cite but won’t reproduce on their own. That alone makes them worth prioritizing in any content strategy.
Real SME expertise
AI Overview responses are quick, generic, and anodyne. By design, they’re unlikely to take a compelling position, make pointed critiques, draw on firsthand experience, use humor, give interesting “hot takes,” or connect concepts to a truer, messy reality. We’ve all seen firsthand how LLMs can flatten even interesting topics into a short, staid summary.
The “what is X” article, either written or informed by a human SME (who’s run the process, made mistakes, formed nuanced opinions about tradeoffs, and genuinely cares), will read differently from an AI summary assembled from five existing explanations.
And at the very least, taking advantage of your organization’s SME expertise in your content process can be a short path to original data or insights — which makes your site far more likely to get cited by AI in the process.
The artificial elephant in the room: Scaled AI content
It’s impossible to discuss top-of-funnel strategy without addressing the elephant in the room: hyper-scaled AI content generation, a tactic some publishers are now treating as a standard TOFU practice.
On the surface, it’s easy to see why marketing departments have adopted the approach. Where AI writing is “strongest” is precisely where most TOFU content lies: generic, topical, informational articles. It’s a fairly low-effort automated lottery ticket for potential traffic gains.
Yet for fully automated, AI-scaled content, even the most meticulously prompted (and least rapacious) strategies may be in trouble. It’s due to a few converging trends:
AI writing quality improvements are slowing
It’s far too early to suggest we’ve reached a plateau in any of AI’s capabilities, but few would be willing to argue that the model-to-model improvements for written content haven’t slowed over the past year. 
Studies show that AI content requires heavy human involvement and per-article prompting to perform. Even a heavily “humanized” AI writing style provides limited value beyond what AI Overviews and LLMs already provide users.
Tools are increasingly calling out AI copy
Claude now watermarks its output, and Pangram has been rolled out across Substack. AI detection infrastructure is gaining traction, and users may increasingly expect it as an integral part of their web experience. 
Beyond these tools, we’re also getting better at AI detection as increased exposure highlights the telltale patterns, tics, limitations, hallucinations, and common annoyances of AI writing.
Google may be changing its mind about AI content
Most notable for those considering developing or continuing scaled AI content strategies is whether Google changes its stance on not penalizing AI writing. Google has been aggressively cracking down on scaled content in successive updates. 
Already, these spam updates appear to be going beyond Google’s long-standing ranking levers of tracking downstream engagement signals, monitoring on-page performance, and weighing backlink signals.
There’s little reason to think content marketers should avoid the use of AI in writing altogether. Studies consistently show AI-enabled human content performs strongly — and in some cases, most strongly.
Yet fully automated, highly scaled AI content appears to have little long-term value.
Dig deeper: The micro-macro shift: How to measure AI visibility now that precision is gone



  
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So, is TOFU worth writing in 2027?
Over the past year, TOFU content in certain B2B industries has shown consistent traffic growth, and its performance has tracked closely with supposedly more-evergreen MOFU content.
Local SEO remains a stable avenue — particularly specialized service guides written with a strong awareness of area interests and needs. But if your industry falls under YMYL, troubling trends mean you may, at the least, want to reassess expectations.
And regardless of your industry, publishers need to recognize that competition across SERPs has gotten far fiercer. To drive actual clicks, your content now has to beat your competitors, as well as AI Overviews and LLMs, on increasingly bloated SERPs.
At least for now, the best strategy for your content is to ask yourself the question publishers should always ask:
Does this page deserve to be published?

New traffic data shows a widening divide between YMYL and B2B tech — and points to the TOFU strategies most likely to work next.

Is top-of-funnel content still worth it in 2027?

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Meta-Ads-Why-creative-diversity-matters-more-than-volume.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Meta Ads: Why creative diversity matters more than volume" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Meta-Ads-Why-creative-diversity-matters-more-than-volume.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Meta-Ads-Why-creative-diversity-matters-more-than-volume-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Meta-Ads-Why-creative-diversity-matters-more-than-volume-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Meta-Ads-Why-creative-diversity-matters-more-than-volume-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Vary hooks, creators, messaging, formats, and offers to give Meta more creative combinations to match with different audiences.

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Meta-Ads-Why-creative-diversity-matters-more-than-volume.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Meta Ads: Why creative diversity matters more than volume" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Meta-Ads-Why-creative-diversity-matters-more-than-volume.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Meta-Ads-Why-creative-diversity-matters-more-than-volume-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Meta-Ads-Why-creative-diversity-matters-more-than-volume-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Meta-Ads-Why-creative-diversity-matters-more-than-volume-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">From building lookalikes to stacking interests and creating dozens of ad sets for different segments, advertisers on Meta have long focused on audience targeting. Those levers matter far less today as <a href="https://searchengineland.com/meta-ai-driven-advertising-system-andromeda-gem-468020">Meta’s AI</a> gets better at finding the right people to achieve campaign objectives.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Broader targeting and machine learning have shifted more of the optimization work from building and testing audiences to creative, which advertisers can directly control.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The mistake many advertisers still make is thinking creative diversity means having more ads. In reality, it means giving Meta fundamentally different ways to communicate the same message so its algorithm can learn which combinations resonate with different people at different times. Here’s how to diversify your creative efforts to drive better results with Meta Ads.</p>



<h2 id="h-meta-s-new-creative-diversity-metric" class="wp-block-heading">Meta’s new creative diversity metric</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Earlier this month, Meta rolled out a new metric in Ads Manager reporting called <a href="https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2371176336684086" target="_blank" rel="noopener">creative diversity</a>, which is the first glimpse into how the platform evaluates the variety of creatives within campaigns and ad sets. To locate this new metric, click <em>Columns > Customize columns > Creative diversity.</em>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img decoding="async" width="767" height="396" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Creative-Diversity-Metric.png" alt="An image of search bar with creative diversity selected for a custom report." class="wp-image-485758"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>Source: Meta Ads Manager</em></figcaption></figure>
</div>


<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Labeled “<a href="https://www.facebook.com/business/help/metrics-labeling" target="_blank" rel="noopener">in development</a>,” the metric estimates how visually diverse your images and videos are. It&#8217;s designed to identify when creatives are becoming too visually similar, reduce creative fatigue, improve long-term campaign performance, and encourage advertisers to introduce more visual variety into their campaigns.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The metric has three ratings: Low, Medium, and High diversity. Naturally, I was curious to see how it rated our client accounts across different industries.&nbsp;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For several accounts where I felt confident about high creative diversity, the metric rated each one low, despite using static images, video ads, videos with a variety of hooks and people, user-generated content, partnership ads, boosted brand organic posts, and carousels.</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img decoding="async" width="668" height="328" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Creative-Diversity-Metric-Estimate.png" alt="An image of the new Meta Ads creative diversity metric description pop-up." class="wp-image-485759"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>Source: Meta Ads Manager</em></figcaption></figure>
</div>


<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The low ratings may reflect the metric’s early stage, stricter-than-expected thresholds, or signals Meta hasn’t disclosed. Its release nonetheless reinforces the growing importance of creative diversity in Meta’s optimization strategy.</p>


<a href="https://www.semrush.com/analytics/traffic/paid-search?utm_campaign=ic_sel_0101ppc&#038;utm_source=searchengineland.com&#038;utm_medium=overlay&#038;onboarding=off" target="_blank">
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      <div id="semrush-one-headline" class="headline-responsive">
        See exactly how <span>your competitors win</span>.
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      <p id="semrush-one-subhead">
        Uncover the keywords, ads, landing pages, and strategies driving your competitors&#8217; paid search success—and find your next opportunity to outperform them.
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    <div>
      <span id="semrush-one-cta">Analyze your competitors</span>
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<h2 id="h-diversity-isn-t-about-quantity" class="wp-block-heading">Diversity isn’t about quantity</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Uploading 20 ads doesn’t automatically create creative diversity. If all 20 ads feature the same product image, opening shot, headline, spokesperson, and messaging, they offer very little variation in Meta’s eyes.&nbsp;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">From an algorithm’s perspective, these 20 ads are simply slight edits of the same creative. Real creative diversity comes from changing meaningful elements that influence how a person experiences and engages with an ad.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">To add more diversity, vary your:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Hook.</li>



<li>Creator or spokesperson.</li>



<li>Visual style.</li>



<li>Messaging angle.</li>



<li>Offer.</li>



<li>Customer pain point.</li>



<li>Emotional appeal.</li>



<li>Format.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Filling your campaigns with meaningful variations gives Meta more to learn from and optimize against to accomplish your goals.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/meta-ai-can-now-analyze-and-optimize-meta-ads-campaigns-485588">Meta AI can now analyze and optimize Meta Ads campaigns</a></em></strong>



<h2 id="h-expand-video-hook-variety" class="wp-block-heading">Expand video hook variety</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The first few seconds determine whether someone will stop scrolling, <a href="https://searchengineland.com/high-performing-social-ads-curiosity-482756">keep watching</a>, or resume scrolling. When developing video content, produce several versions of each video that begin differently. For example, a skincare brand may want to test:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>POV: You finally find a moisturizer that doesn’t leave your skin looking greasy</li>



<li>Three mistakes almost everyone makes with their skincare routine</li>



<li>I wish I knew this about my skin before turning 40</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The body of the video can remain the same, but the same creator or spokesperson can record several different hooks to appeal to different people, their motivations, problems, and stages of familiarity with your brand.</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img decoding="async" width="612" height="1088" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Akvile-DeFazio-POV-IG-Example.png" alt="An image of a POV video on Instagram" class="wp-image-485760"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>An image of a POV video on Instagram</em></figcaption></figure>
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<hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-cyan-bluish-gray-color has-css-opacity has-cyan-bluish-gray-background-color has-background"/>



<h2 id="h-go-beyond-format" class="wp-block-heading">Go beyond format</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">While it’s important to have a variety of formats in your campaigns, such as images, videos, and carousels, the strongest-performing accounts I see on Meta today have more layers of diversification across multiple dimensions.&nbsp;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Give Meta more opportunities to learn and optimize by testing:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Founder videos.</li>



<li>User-generated content (UGC).</li>



<li>Customer testimonials.</li>



<li>Partnership Ads with creators.</li>



<li>Lifestyle photography.</li>



<li>Product photography.</li>



<li>Educational content.</li>



<li>Unboxing videos.</li>



<li>Reviews.</li>



<li>Social proof.</li>



<li>Reaction videos.</li>



<li>Problem/solution.</li>



<li>Meme-style creatives.</li>
</ul>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img decoding="async" width="442" height="989" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Meta-Ads-Gruns-Comment-Hijack.png" alt="An image of a POV video on Instagram." class="wp-image-485761"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>Source: Meta Ads – Grüns</em></figcaption></figure>
</div>


<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/high-performing-social-ads-curiosity-482756">How to build curiosity into high-performing social ads</a></em></strong>



<h2 id="h-fight-fatigue-with-diversity" class="wp-block-heading">Fight fatigue with diversity</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Creative fatigue happens when a person sees the same ad too many times. When Meta has only a handful of similar creatives to serve, delivery will naturally concentrate on the one that performs best. As time goes on, ad frequency increases, performance declines, and costs rise, making your campaign less efficient and effective.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">By introducing fundamentally different creative, you’ll give the system more options to test before fatigue sets in. As you diversify in more directions, you’ll also give Meta more opportunities to identify patterns, such as which hooks attract different people, which creators resonate with certain demographics, which messaging is more effective at converting colder versus warmer audiences.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The more meaningful your variations are, the richer the signals Meta can use to optimize your campaigns. You’ll build a deeper pool of creatives that can rotate as performance shifts, so you won’t have to rely on one winning ad to carry the entire campaign.</p>



<h2 id="h-make-creative-diversity-part-of-your-meta-ads-workflow" class="wp-block-heading">Make creative diversity part of your Meta Ads workflow</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If your creative workflow still revolves around producing a handful of ads every month, it may be time to<a href="https://searchengineland.com/structure-paid-social-creative-testing-478963"> rework the process</a>. Take a winning ad and determine how you can recreate it in 10 new ways to tell the same story. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">While it may be a heavier lift on the creative side, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel entirely. When working with creators or using storytellers from your organization, one creator can produce:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Multiple hooks.</li>



<li>Different captions.</li>



<li>Several CTAs at the end.</li>



<li>Different aspect ratios.</li>



<li>Various thumbnails.</li>



<li>Different lengths.</li>



<li>Product-first and creator-first edits.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">By planning ideas ahead, one shoot can produce more than a single asset, and a little more work up front will give you a longer runway to test the new ads you’ve created.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/dying-ads-creative-fatigue-463690">Your ads are dying: How to spot and stop creative fatigue before it tanks performance</a></em></strong>

From building lookalikes to stacking interests and creating dozens of ad sets for different segments, advertisers on Meta have long focused on audience targeting. Those levers matter far less today as Meta’s AI gets better at finding the right people to achieve campaign objectives.
Broader targeting and machine learning have shifted more of the optimization work from building and testing audiences to creative, which advertisers can directly control.
The mistake many advertisers still make is thinking creative diversity means having more ads. In reality, it means giving Meta fundamentally different ways to communicate the same message so its algorithm can learn which combinations resonate with different people at different times. Here’s how to diversify your creative efforts to drive better results with Meta Ads.
Meta’s new creative diversity metric
Earlier this month, Meta rolled out a new metric in Ads Manager reporting called creative diversity, which is the first glimpse into how the platform evaluates the variety of creatives within campaigns and ad sets. To locate this new metric, click Columns > Customize columns > Creative diversity.



Source: Meta Ads Manager



Labeled “in development,” the metric estimates how visually diverse your images and videos are. It’s designed to identify when creatives are becoming too visually similar, reduce creative fatigue, improve long-term campaign performance, and encourage advertisers to introduce more visual variety into their campaigns.
The metric has three ratings: Low, Medium, and High diversity. Naturally, I was curious to see how it rated our client accounts across different industries. 
For several accounts where I felt confident about high creative diversity, the metric rated each one low, despite using static images, video ads, videos with a variety of hooks and people, user-generated content, partnership ads, boosted brand organic posts, and carousels.
Source: Meta Ads Manager



The low ratings may reflect the metric’s early stage, stricter-than-expected thresholds, or signals Meta hasn’t disclosed. Its release nonetheless reinforces the growing importance of creative diversity in Meta’s optimization strategy.
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Diversity isn’t about quantity
Uploading 20 ads doesn’t automatically create creative diversity. If all 20 ads feature the same product image, opening shot, headline, spokesperson, and messaging, they offer very little variation in Meta’s eyes. 
From an algorithm’s perspective, these 20 ads are simply slight edits of the same creative. Real creative diversity comes from changing meaningful elements that influence how a person experiences and engages with an ad.
To add more diversity, vary your:
Hook.
Creator or spokesperson.
Visual style.
Messaging angle.
Offer.
Customer pain point.
Emotional appeal.
Format.
Filling your campaigns with meaningful variations gives Meta more to learn from and optimize against to accomplish your goals.
Dig deeper: Meta AI can now analyze and optimize Meta Ads campaigns



Expand video hook variety
The first few seconds determine whether someone will stop scrolling, keep watching, or resume scrolling. When developing video content, produce several versions of each video that begin differently. For example, a skincare brand may want to test:
POV: You finally find a moisturizer that doesn’t leave your skin looking greasy
Three mistakes almost everyone makes with their skincare routine
I wish I knew this about my skin before turning 40
The body of the video can remain the same, but the same creator or spokesperson can record several different hooks to appeal to different people, their motivations, problems, and stages of familiarity with your brand.
An image of a POV video on Instagram




	
	
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
 
				
				
			
See terms.
		
Go beyond format
While it’s important to have a variety of formats in your campaigns, such as images, videos, and carousels, the strongest-performing accounts I see on Meta today have more layers of diversification across multiple dimensions. 
Give Meta more opportunities to learn and optimize by testing:
Founder videos.
User-generated content (UGC).
Customer testimonials.
Partnership Ads with creators.
Lifestyle photography.
Product photography.
Educational content.
Unboxing videos.
Reviews.
Social proof.
Reaction videos.
Problem/solution.
Meme-style creatives.
Source: Meta Ads – Grüns



Dig deeper: How to build curiosity into high-performing social ads



Fight fatigue with diversity
Creative fatigue happens when a person sees the same ad too many times. When Meta has only a handful of similar creatives to serve, delivery will naturally concentrate on the one that performs best. As time goes on, ad frequency increases, performance declines, and costs rise, making your campaign less efficient and effective.
By introducing fundamentally different creative, you’ll give the system more options to test before fatigue sets in. As you diversify in more directions, you’ll also give Meta more opportunities to identify patterns, such as which hooks attract different people, which creators resonate with certain demographics, which messaging is more effective at converting colder versus warmer audiences.
The more meaningful your variations are, the richer the signals Meta can use to optimize your campaigns. You’ll build a deeper pool of creatives that can rotate as performance shifts, so you won’t have to rely on one winning ad to carry the entire campaign.
Make creative diversity part of your Meta Ads workflow
If your creative workflow still revolves around producing a handful of ads every month, it may be time to rework the process. Take a winning ad and determine how you can recreate it in 10 new ways to tell the same story. 
While it may be a heavier lift on the creative side, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel entirely. When working with creators or using storytellers from your organization, one creator can produce:
Multiple hooks.
Different captions.
Several CTAs at the end.
Different aspect ratios.
Various thumbnails.
Different lengths.
Product-first and creator-first edits.
By planning ideas ahead, one shoot can produce more than a single asset, and a little more work up front will give you a longer runway to test the new ads you’ve created.
Dig deeper: Your ads are dying: How to spot and stop creative fatigue before it tanks performance

Vary hooks, creators, messaging, formats, and offers to give Meta more creative combinations to match with different audiences.

Meta Ads: Why creative diversity matters more than volume

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Has-Google-demoted-listicles-featured-image.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Has Google demoted listicles - featured-image" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Has-Google-demoted-listicles-featured-image.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Has-Google-demoted-listicles-featured-image-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Has-Google-demoted-listicles-featured-image-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Has-Google-demoted-listicles-featured-image-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>A 60,000-query analysis reveals where listicles still rank, where they’ve declined, and why ranking well doesn’t guarantee clicks.


Aren’t listicles dead? 
Brands have been writing self-serving listicles as a classic SEO play for years, and many have ramped up production at the start of AI Search due to their outsized influence on citations. But over the last 12 months, we’ve seen growing evidence that the tactic of editorial “best of” or roundup pages has run its course.
Lots of great research over the last 12 months from experts like Lily Ray, Nick Haigler, and Glen Allsopp has shown that:
Listicles are the most-cited page type in ChatGPT answers at 43.8% of 26,283 source URLs, including lists where brands rank themselves first.
Google began demoting sites built on self-serving listicles in January 2026, with several SaaS brands losing 29 to 49% of organic visibility within weeks.
ChatGPT cut listicle citations by 30% from December 2025 to January 2026, with Wikipedia and Reddit absorbing the lost share.
And yet, whenever I still use Google (which is not that often anymore), I still encounter listicles all the time. So, what gives? A few questions came up for me:
How often are listicles still present?
Can we spot a demotion of self-serving listicles?
What are the characteristics of a listicle that consistently perform well?
Should companies write listicles at all?
I set out to find the answers to those questions with a large data pull: I analyzed 60,000 US-English desktop Google queries across 15 verticals using SE Ranking. The dataset contains 5.32 million organic-result rows collected during a 47-hour window in August. 
I’ll split the findings into two Memos: Memo one (this one) answers questions 1 and 2. Memo two (next week) will answer 3 and 4, so stay tuned.
Definition of a listicle
A lot of confusion comes from not using the terminology correctly (tell me you’re a nerd without telling me you’re a nerd).
The word listicle is a combination of article and list. Or, in other words, a listicle is an article where the list is the content. The body consists of discrete, same-type items (tools, ideas, examples, options) that are comparable to one another. Each item gets a self-contained treatment (usually its own heading). And the title promises a bounded set, with or without a number.
A step-by-step tutorial (“How to set up Asana”) is sequential, not a listicle, because item 3 depends on item 2. Listicle items can be reordered without breaking the logic.
A few examples of listicles:
https://www.nerdwallet.com/credit-cards/best/cash-back
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gpus,4380.html
https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/five-investing-ideas
https://www.salesforce.com/small-business/types-of-businesses/
https://travel.usnews.com/hotels/best-all-inclusive-resorts-in-usa/
https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness-exercise/at-home-workouts
Listicles can come from different types of companies with varying incentives: affiliates like NerdWallet, publishers like U.S. News, or brands like Salesforce.
Website owner type: brand, publisher, retailer, platform, nonprofit, or community.
Incentive: self-promotional, affiliate-supported, independent, or unclear.
Methodology
60,000 US-English desktop Google queries were analyzed across 15 verticals using SE Ranking data. 
This dataset contains 5.32 million organic-result rows from a 47-hour window in August 2026.
Queries were stratified by vertical, query wording, and query length, then weighted to the intended sample mix.
Duplicate records and successful-but-empty SERPs were excluded.
A nested 20,000-query subset captured additional search-result features, including AI Overviews, video, images, People Also Ask, Reddit, and YouTube.
Each result was automatically classified as a listicle or not using its title, snippet, URL, and website type. The classification separated numbered list articles from unnumbered editorial roundups and excluded product grids, directories, forums, video pages, single-item reviews, and step-by-step guides.
The data pipeline was checked for completeness, duplicate queries, and rank integrity. I also manually reviewed website ownership and conducted a blind quality review of 30 pages. The initial classifier pilot achieved 100% precision and recall on 30 queries, but an untouched production holdout remains the final validation step.
The study is observational and reflects one crawl wave. It identifies associations between query wording, listicle presence, and ranking, not causal effects.
Has Google demoted listicles?
The results from this dataset do not show a universal penalty for listicles. At least one listicle appeared in the top 10 for 55.1% of queries and in the top three for 32.3%.




85.9% of search results pages contained at least one title with a broad list cue: a one-to-three-digit number or a word such as “best,” “top,” “ways,” “ideas,” “examples,” “alternatives,” “tips,” “tools,” “apps,” or “options.”
However, stronger classification shows a confirmed listicle on 55.1% of search results pages. In other words, half of search results contain true listicles.
The query itself is the biggest factor deciding whether Google shows a listicle or not. Google shows 4.5x more listicles when users ask for a set of options.








When a query explicitly asks for ideas, examples, options, or the best items, listicles dominate the top results. 
When the request for multiple options is only implied in a query, the listicle advantage largely disappears.
The top-three rate rose to 54.5% for explicit-list queries compared with 10.2% for implicit category or comparison queries.
The rate of listicle appearance was 12.1% for the comparison group of informational queries that did not ask for a list.
However, one suggestive hint that Google is demoting (self-serving) listicles is that almost half of them come from publishers instead of known brands/vendors.




Publishers also won 54.0% of 4,026 direct matchups against a brand or vendor listicle on the same search results page. When examining the top 5 results in the SERP, the publisher averaged position 4.24 in those matchups, compared with 4.71 for the brand or vendor.
Publishing and content platforms had the strongest conditional rank at 3.76 when one of their listicles appeared in the top 10.
Publishers averaged 3.99, government, academic, and nonprofit sites averaged 4.48, and brands or vendors averaged 4.65.
The 5,765 domains that supplied top-10 listicle leaders point to a broad market with a long tail:
The top 10 domains accounted for 18.3%, and the top 50 accounted for 36.5%.
The remaining 5,715 domains accounted for 63.5%.
What about self-promoting listicles?
Self-promoting listicles come from brands (software companies, banks, service providers, etc.) that put themselves first in their lists to influence AI answers. A classic example is to write about the “x best [insert category]” and list yourself at the top. By the way, sometimes you can influence “objective” listicles (from affiliates or publishers) by paying for it, but Google cannot detect that since those transactions happen behind closed doors.
So now that we know that there is a difference between publishers who create listicles for products vs. self-serving listicles that come from brands, the question is whether the latter has seen a demotion since brands go bonkers with it?
We know from Lily Ray’s analyses that the unannounced mid-January Google update impacts listicles. I’ve observed the same, anecdotally. We also know from Peec that there doesn’t seem to be a demotion for self-promoting listicles in citations across ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and AI Overviews.
In this study, I compared a fixed subset of 2,400 queries and 24,000 search results between January and August. The results: The search results changed substantially. Only 52.5% of queries had the same exact URL at position one in both periods, and only 58.3% had the same domain. At position one, the conservative listicle range fell from 18.9% to 20.2% in January to 15.1% to 15.6% in August. Across the top three, the January range was 35.9% to 39.0%, compared with 32.0% to 33.0% in August.







That is the listicle penalty we’ve seen anecdotally. But I cannot trace it back to self-promoting listicles specifically. As a matter of fact, 62% of vendor-authored listicles gained estimated organic traffic since January, and the median page gained 38%.
Results differ by vertical
Listicle occurrence in the organic top 10 ranged from 42.0% in entertainment and gaming to 67.2% in beauty and fashion. B2B software reached 62.5%, while travel reached 49.3%.




Brand or vendor listicles varied even more. They appeared in the top 10 on 46.2% of B2B software search results pages, compared with 3.3% in food and 6.2% in travel.




That, to me, is symptomatic of how B2B companies use listicles to “optimize” for AI Search, which is a much smaller lever for consumer-oriented verticals. After all, I’d argue it’s mostly B2B brands using listicles for AI Search optimization. However, it also shows that listicles are by no means dead.
Listicles solve for intent but face tough competition
Demotion or not, the reality is that listicles face heavy competition for attention. 92% of SERPs with a top-10 listicle also contained Reddit or YouTube somewhere on the page. Both platforms appeared together on 53% of those SERPs.




The practical consequence is that a page can lose attention (think: clicks) without losing its position among standard unpaid results. Listicle-related keywords seem to carry high buyer intent, but don’t expect a flood of conversions amid AI Overviews, Reddit, and YouTube. The average share of AI Overviews across all verticals was 83.7% to 93.4% in B2B, where listicles appear most!
Reddit and YouTube occupy different positions in the organic results.
Reddit placed in the top 3 on 70.7% of the search results pages where it appeared in the top 10. YouTube did so on 11.1%.
When Reddit appeared in the top 10, its best result averaged position 3.31 and had a median position of 2. YouTube averaged position 6.62 and had a median position of 7.
Reddit and YouTube can appear as ordinary links, embedded result boxes, and sources in Google’s AI-generated answer for the same query.
Reddit ranked above YouTube on 84.5% of the 19,729 search results pages where both appeared in the top 10. The Reddit advantage reached 90.4% on explicit list queries and fell to 69.9% on implicit category or comparison queries.
YouTube gains more reach outside ordinary organic results. In the 20K-query advanced panel, video boxes and AI Overview citations added 20.7 percentage points of YouTube reach beyond search results pages where YouTube already ranked in the organic top 10. The same increase for Reddit was 2.1 percentage points.




The platform pattern also changes by vertical.
Reddit had greater organic top-10 presence than YouTube in 11 of 15 verticals. Its largest advantages appeared in travel (+40.6 percentage points), education and careers (+22.8), finance (+21.9), family and pets (+21.1), and automotive (+19.6).
YouTube led in 4 verticals: food (+40.8 percentage points), health (+19.1), home and DIY (+15.1), and beauty and fashion (+6.1).
Reddit’s organic top-10 presence peaked at 77.1% in automotive and fell to 25.7% in health.
YouTube peaked at 78.1% in food and fell to 29.7% in travel.
The pattern suggests different platform roles. Reddit is stronger in research and comparison-oriented categories, while YouTube is stronger where visual demonstration, inspiration, or instruction matters.
So, are listicles dead?
Has Google demoted listicles? Yes, in a very targeted way. We see almost 4% fewer listicles in position 1 and the top 3. And yet, they remain very present in Google’s search results. Listicles that are performing well in August have even gained traffic since January. So, Google has systematically and carefully weeded out certain listicles.
My take is that the aggressive use of AI to create (poor) listicles has led to a flood that Google targeted with the secret mid-January update. Quality and velocity seem to be markers in Google’s latest spam algorithm updates.
That said, and this is the bigger issue here: Even where listicles perform well, the click opportunity shrinks. 92% of listicle SERPs carry Reddit or YouTube results; 93.4% of listicle-related B2B query results have AI Overviews.
Look, I have my own moral judgments about self-promoting listicles. There’s a degree of cringe to it. There is also a degree of business impact to it, though we don’t know how much. So, the way I reconcile the two is by seeking evidence for putting yourself first. For example, can your G2 grid position or reviews support that “you’re the best”?
Next week, we’ll dive deep into my observations on what well-performing listicles do better than others, and whether it’s still worth creating listicles.
This post first appeared on the author’s website and is republished here with permission.

A 60,000-query analysis reveals where listicles still rank, where they’ve declined, and why ranking well doesn’t guarantee clicks.

Has Google demoted listicles?

<div><img width="1672" height="941" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-Ads-PMax-channels.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-Ads-PMax-channels.png 1672w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-Ads-PMax-channels-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-Ads-PMax-channels-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-Ads-PMax-channels-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1672px) 100vw, 1672px" /></div>Google is testing new Performance Max controls that let advertisers influence which channels the algorithm prioritizes.

<div><img width="1672" height="941" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-Ads-PMax-channels.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-Ads-PMax-channels.png 1672w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-Ads-PMax-channels-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-Ads-PMax-channels-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Google-Ads-PMax-channels-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1672px) 100vw, 1672px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google is testing a new Performance Max channel setting that could give advertisers a direct way to tell the algorithm which channels they value more — a notable departure from PMax&#8217;s traditionally automated approach to channel allocation.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The feature, currently described as being in alpha testing, includes adjustment controls for Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What’s new.</strong> The experimental &#8220;Channels&#8221; setting appears to let advertisers make positive or negative adjustments for individual Performance Max channels.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="800" height="687" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/PMax-controls.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-485826" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/PMax-controls.jpeg 800w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/PMax-controls-768x660.jpeg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A positive adjustment relaxes the CPA the system is willing to accept for that channel, effectively signaling that the advertiser places greater value on conversions coming from it. A negative adjustment tightens the CPA, encouraging PMax to place less emphasis on that channel.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Importantly, this isn&#8217;t the same as assigning a fixed percentage of budget to Search or YouTube. Instead, advertisers appear to be influencing the economics PMax uses when deciding where to pursue conversions.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why it’s significant.</strong> Performance Max has historically given advertisers little direct control over how budgets are distributed between Google&#8217;s inventory.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Advertisers could influence the system through assets, audience signals, search themes and conversion value data, but Google&#8217;s existing documentation says advertisers can&#8217;t directly control how PMax allocates budget by channel.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If broadly released, this would represent a much more direct lever for influencing that mix.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>From visibility to control.</strong> The test follows Google&#8217;s introduction of <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-begins-rolling-out-performance-max-channel-performance-reporting-456251">channel-level Performance Max reporting</a>, which gave advertisers greater visibility into where campaigns were serving and spending.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The new setting could provide the next piece of that puzzle: the ability to take what advertisers learn from channel reporting and use it to influence how PMax behaves.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>But attribution complicates things.</strong> Channel-level performance isn&#8217;t necessarily the same thing as channel-level value. A user could first encounter an advertiser through a YouTube ad and later convert through Search. Looking only at the channel receiving conversion credit could therefore make YouTube appear less valuable than its actual contribution to the customer journey.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Aggressively tightening a channel because its directly attributed CPA looks poor could potentially reduce demand or conversions elsewhere in the campaign.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why we care.</strong> Advertisers have spent years asking for more control over Performance Max, and this test could be one of the most consequential controls Google has introduced. It could help advertisers correct unwanted channel allocation without abandoning PMax altogether. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">But it also creates another optimization decision: marketers will need to understand the role each channel plays beyond last-touch performance before telling Google&#8217;s algorithm where to pull back.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Bottom line.</strong> Google appears to be testing a significant shift in Performance Max: giving advertisers a direct lever to influence which channels its algorithm prioritizes. After giving marketers greater visibility into channel performance, Google may now be starting to give them more control over what happens next.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>First spotted. </strong>This update was spotted by Search Marketing Advisor Heidi Sturrock, who shared spotting it on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7497705244001370112/">LinkdedIn</a>.</p>


Google is testing a new Performance Max channel setting that could give advertisers a direct way to tell the algorithm which channels they value more — a notable departure from PMax’s traditionally automated approach to channel allocation.
The feature, currently described as being in alpha testing, includes adjustment controls for Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps.
What’s new. The experimental “Channels” setting appears to let advertisers make positive or negative adjustments for individual Performance Max channels.




A positive adjustment relaxes the CPA the system is willing to accept for that channel, effectively signaling that the advertiser places greater value on conversions coming from it. A negative adjustment tightens the CPA, encouraging PMax to place less emphasis on that channel.
Importantly, this isn’t the same as assigning a fixed percentage of budget to Search or YouTube. Instead, advertisers appear to be influencing the economics PMax uses when deciding where to pursue conversions.
Why it’s significant. Performance Max has historically given advertisers little direct control over how budgets are distributed between Google’s inventory.
Advertisers could influence the system through assets, audience signals, search themes and conversion value data, but Google’s existing documentation says advertisers can’t directly control how PMax allocates budget by channel.
If broadly released, this would represent a much more direct lever for influencing that mix.
From visibility to control. The test follows Google’s introduction of channel-level Performance Max reporting, which gave advertisers greater visibility into where campaigns were serving and spending.
The new setting could provide the next piece of that puzzle: the ability to take what advertisers learn from channel reporting and use it to influence how PMax behaves.
But attribution complicates things. Channel-level performance isn’t necessarily the same thing as channel-level value. A user could first encounter an advertiser through a YouTube ad and later convert through Search. Looking only at the channel receiving conversion credit could therefore make YouTube appear less valuable than its actual contribution to the customer journey.
Aggressively tightening a channel because its directly attributed CPA looks poor could potentially reduce demand or conversions elsewhere in the campaign.
Why we care. Advertisers have spent years asking for more control over Performance Max, and this test could be one of the most consequential controls Google has introduced. It could help advertisers correct unwanted channel allocation without abandoning PMax altogether. 
But it also creates another optimization decision: marketers will need to understand the role each channel plays beyond last-touch performance before telling Google’s algorithm where to pull back.
Bottom line. Google appears to be testing a significant shift in Performance Max: giving advertisers a direct lever to influence which channels its algorithm prioritizes. After giving marketers greater visibility into channel performance, Google may now be starting to give them more control over what happens next.
First spotted. This update was spotted by Search Marketing Advisor Heidi Sturrock, who shared spotting it on LinkdedIn.

Google is testing new Performance Max controls that let advertisers influence which channels the algorithm prioritizes.

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