There’s a comfortable narrative around ecommerce AI search right now: AI systems tend to surface large, well-known ecommerce brands; marketplaces lead many commercial answers; and the playbook is to optimize product pages, category pages, product feeds, and structured data to improve a site’s machine readability. That is partly true. Product detail pages (PDPs), product listing […]
Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his […]
Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol can now handle shopping carts, live catalog queries, and loyalty program benefits for AI agent transactions. On March 19, Google announced three new UCP capabilities and a simplified onboarding path through Merchant Center, two months after Google and Shopify unveiled UCP at the National Retail Federation conference in January 2026. The January launch had a […]
Microsoft Advertising is giving advertisers more flexibility in reporting, with custom columns now supporting all conversion metrics — a move aimed at deeper, more tailored campaign analysis. What’s happening. According to Microsoft’s product liaison Navah Hopkins, advertisers can now build custom metrics using the full range of conversion data available in the platform. This includes […]
Each month, we host an SEO update covering the latest in search and AI. During this month’s edition, our SEO experts Carolyn Shelby and Alex Moss, cover everything from the latest advances in Agentic AI to Google’s spam and core updates and why simply publishing more content is no longer enough and in many cases […]
If you’ve done keyword research before, you know the problem: hundreds of terms that look slightly different, no clear way to organize them, and no obvious path to content. A keyword clustering tool solves that. In Semrush, the Keyword Strategy Builder handles clustering automatically. You can start from scratch with a few seed keywords or […]
My first keyword research advice would be: Know your niche! Keyword research allows you to have a deeper understanding of the sub-topics and recurring themes in your niche. Let’s say you have a blog about hiking. You don’t need to be a genius to know that one of the keywords you want to rank for […]
AI search exists on a spectrum. At one end: a human asks an AI a question and gets a fast, generated response. At the other: an AI receives a goal and browses the web on a human’s behalf. It evaluates your brand, makes a decision, and leaves no trace in your analytics. That’s agentic search. […]
With the Internet playing an important role in how businesses operate and reach their customers, taking steps to improve how you show up in the digital space is vital. One of the first and most important steps a business will take to improve its digital impact is to hire a digital marketing specialist. In this […]
Wednesday was a relatively normal day for me in Google Land. I was auditing client sites, still digging into the March 2026 core update movement, and posting the latest SEO and AI Search news across social media. But then an interesting email arrived. It was from a company I helped last year and the subject […]