Dec 17 2024

Searchquake: Consumers Now Consider ChatGPT A Real Google Alternative via @sejournal, @gsterling

In just two years, ChatGPT has managed to do something no company has done in the last 20 years: present a viable challenge to Google.

There’s evidence that people are using it instead of traditional search in an increasing number of cases.

For example, ChatGPT’s traffic recently surpassed Bing, and its referral traffic has been growing by triple digits.

Yet, Google’s search volumes and market share appear to be unaffected. Is it a question of scale, and is ChatGPT’s impact still too small to register? If so, perhaps not for much longer

There have been several consumer surveys asking about current perceptions of search quality and others exploring AI adoption. But, there haven’t been any studies that looked closely into whether AI impacts consumer attitudes toward Google and their usage of Search.

So, we decided to create one to answer a range of direct questions we were curious to know the answers to:

Is it easier or harder to find what you’re looking for on Google vs. three years ago?
What’s your “go-to” AI tool, and how often do you use it?
What do you like about AI?
Are AI applications and search engines basically interchangeable or different?
Has using AI changed how much you use Google?
Does AI or search provide a better experience (across multiple categories)?
If you had to choose only one tool (Search or AI), what would it be?
Will AI replace traditional search engines in the next three years?

My research program, Dialog, asked these and numerous other questions to an online consumer panel last month. We qualified potential respondents using two criteria:

They had to be at least weekly search users.
They must have used at least one AI application “ever” (on a list of 11).

We recruited more than 2,200 respondents and disqualified over half of them, most often because they didn’t answer yes to the AI screening question.

In the end, we had 1,000 U.S. respondents who roughly mirrored U.S. Census data.

Key Survey Findings

Here are some of the survey’s major findings:

While Google is dominant, consumers use multiple sites to make purchase decisions.
44% of U.S. adults have used AI applications at least once (100% of respondents had).
77% of survey respondents said it had become easier to find things on Google.
57% use AI daily; roughly half of them use it multiple times a day.
49% see AI and search as essentially interchangeable.
67% think AI will likely replace traditional search engines within three years.

Search Is Fragmenting

It’s important to point out that the often binary discussion of Search vs. AI misses the fact that people have been using numerous other sites for search and discovery for some time.

Some people might be surprised, for example, that a majority of U.S. adults on TikTok are looking for product reviews and recommendations.

Dialog’s survey suggests that people routinely use multiple sites to conduct pre-purchase research, though Google is the most widely used.

The precise percentages are less important than the fact that so many sites were named.

Image from author, December 2024

Search Today Is ‘Much Easier’

The general consensus in the SEO community and tech press is that Google’s search quality has declined for several years.

If you don’t believe this, just Google “Is Google getting worse?” (There’s a longer debate as to why this might be.)

We fully expected consumers to express a similar sentiment. But they didn’t.

In fact, 77% said that they thought it was easier or “much easier” to find what they were looking for on Google today vs. three years ago.

While this doesn’t explicitly address search quality, it reflects a positive user experience.

Image from author, December 2024

We didn’t follow up on this question, so we don’t have a good explanation for the finding.

One potential theory is that much of search activity today is brand-related or navigational, which Google does a good job with.

Another theory is that users have become more capable searchers. But neither is fully persuasive.

Search And AI Are ‘Interchangeable’

As mentioned, we disqualified potential respondents who said they’d never used an AI application.

Among our sample, however, there were very few infrequent AI users; 92% said they used AI at least weekly, and 57% were daily users, with a substantial minority using it multiple times a day.

ChatGPT was the dominant AI tool, although Gemini was not far behind – and these are regular searchers, with 64% using Search/Google multiple times a day.

We also wanted to understand whether consumers saw Search and AI as similar tools or different.

Roughly half of our respondents said that Search and AI were indeed similar and that they used them in similar ways. The other half said that they were different or weren’t sure.

Image from author, December 2024

The broad significance of this finding is that a meaningful number of relatively heavy search users are potentially open to substituting AI (ChatGPT) for Google.

Beyond this, our respondents said they liked many things about AI/ChatGPT:

Ability to ask follow-up questions – 44%
Direct answers vs. website links – 42%
Overall quality of answers – 40%
‘Conversational’ interaction – 38%
More comprehensive information – 37%
Lack of ads – 35%
Other (please specify) – 1%

While the majority said they found AI content trustworthy, there were still concerns about privacy and information accuracy.

Search Beats ChatGPT – Or Does It?

We asked consumers to decide whether they thought search or AI would provide a better experience and outcome across a range of content categories and use cases.

Across the board, Google/Search won. Some categories were closer than others (i.e., recipes, product research, and financial planning).

Image from author, December 2024

This is a Rorschach-like, “half empty-half full” chart.

If you’re rooting for Search, you can take comfort in Google’s seemingly clear victory. But, the other side of this is that a substantial number of people thought AI would do a better job.

Presenting consumers with a list of 11 Search and Search-adjacent tools, including Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and others, we then asked, “If you had to choose only one of these for all your research and purchase decision-making needs, which would it be?”

If you only had to choose one, most people chose Google

Image from author, December 2024

The largest group of 36% chose Google, as you would expect. ChatGPT was second, and Gemini came in third.

When you combine the ChatGPT and Gemini respondents, Google only prevails by a slim two-point margin.

Conclusion: AI Inevitability?

More than two-thirds of these consumers answered “likely” or “very likely” to the question, “Will AI replace search in the next three years?”

Only 12% said it was unlikely, and the rest weren’t sure. Again, this is a group that likes Google and thinks it delivers a better experience than AI in most cases.

Will Google be displaced in three years? Not a chance.

But, the fact that a majority believe it’s possible may impact their expectations and behavior – it also indicates their potential openness to switching. Google has been seen as invulnerable until now.

Feeling competitive pressure, Google is rapidly evolving and leaning on AI to beat back the ChatGPT threat.

In doing so, the Google SERP may increasingly come to mimic the AI user experience.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently proclaimed that the search experience would “continue to change profoundly in 2025.”

What we know for sure is that the next phase of search will be quite different, and that the search landscape may, in fact, be fragmenting.

Regardless, Google and AI “answer engines” will co-exist, and the customer journey will undoubtedly become even more complex.

Marketers will need to be flexible and ready. Business as usual is over.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Pickadook/Shutterstock

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Dec 17 2024

Google’s Ex-CEO on AI: What SEOs Should Pay Attention To via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that the trajectory of AI is both “enticing” and “frightening.” He emphasized that AI is not just an evolution of technology, it’s about shaping the future of humanity. His comments reflect how the highest levels of technology leaders think about AI and carry implications for how this will play out for SEO.

Tech Companies Shouldn’t Be Making The Decisions

Asked if the decisions about the future of technology should be left to people like him, Eric Schmidt responded no. He cited Henry Kissinger who ten years ago said that people like Schmidt should not be making the decisions and used the example of social media to explain why.

“Let’s look at social media. We’ve now arrived at a situation where we have these huge companies in which I was part of. And they all have this huge positive implication for entertainment and culture, but they have significant negative implications in terms of tribalism, misinformation, individual harm, especially against young people, and especially against young women.

None of us foresaw that. Maybe if we’d had some non-technical people doing this with us, we would have foreseen the impact on society. I don’t want us to make that mistake again with a much more powerful tool.”

AI Is Both Frightening & Enticing

Eric Schmidt has been an active participant in the development of computer technology since 1975 to the present. The awe he expresses for the point in time we are in now is something that everyone at every level of search marketing, from publishing, SEO, advertising to ecommerce should be aware of. The precipice we find ourselves at right now should not be underestimated and at this point it barely seems possible to overestimate it.

Given that Sundar Pichai, Google’s current CEO, stated that search will be changing in profound ways in 2025 and the revelation that Google Gemini 2.0 will play a role in powering AI search, Schmidt’s declarations about the mind-boggling scale of computing capabilities should be of high importance to search marketers in both the enticing capabilities for them and frightening realities of what Google will be doing.

Schmidt observed:

“There are two really big things happening right now in our industry. One is the the development of what are called agents, where agents can do something. So you can say I want to build a house so you find the architect, go through the land use, buy the houses. Can all be done by computer not just by humans.

And then the other thing is the ability for the computer to write code. So if I say to you I wanted sort of study the audience for this show and I want you to figure out how to make a variant of my show for each and every person who’s watching it. The computer can do that. That’s how powerful the programming capabilities of AI are.

In my case, I’ve managed programmers my whole life and they typically don’t do what I want. You know, they do whatever they want.

With a computer, it’ll do exactly what you say. And the gains in computer programming from the AI systems are frightening, they’re both enticing because they will change the slope.
Right now, the slope of AI is like this…”

Screenshot Of Schmidt Illustrating The Slope Of AI

He continued his answer:

“…and when you have AI scientists, that is computers developing AI, the slope will go this… it will go wham! But that development puts an awful lot of power in the hands of an awful lot of people.”

Screenshot Of Eric Schmidt Illustrating The Future AI Slope

Embedding The Intrinsic Goodness Of Humanity In AI

The interview ended with a question and answer around the possibility of embedding positive human values and ethical principles into AI systems during their development.

There are some people who complain about the ethical guardrails placed on AI, claiming that the guardrails are based on political or ideological values, reflecting the tension between those who feel entitled to the freedom to use AI to whatever ends they desire and those who fear that AI may be used for evil purposes.

Eric Schmidt addresses this tension by saying that machines can be embedded with the best of human goodness.

The interviewer noted that Schmidt, in his book, expressed confidence that machines will reflect “the intrinsic goodness in humanity” and asked whether humanity can truly be considered inherently good, especially when some people clearly aren’t.

Schmidt acknowledged that there is a certain percentage of people who are evil. But he also expressed that in general people tend to be good and that humans can put ethical rules into AI machines.

He explained:

“The good news is the vast majority of humans on the planet are well meaning, they’re social creatures. They want themselves to do well and they want their neighbors and especially their tribe, to do well.

I see no reason to think that we can’t put those rules into the computers.

One of the tech companies started its training of its model by putting in the Constitution and the Constitution was embedded inside of the model of how you treat things.

Now, of course, we can disagree on what the Constitution is. But these systems are under our control.

There are humans who are making decisions to train them, and furthermore, the systems that you use, whether it’s ChatGPT or Gemini or or Claude or what have you, have all been carefully examined after they were produced to make sure they don’t have any really horrific rough edges.

So humans are directly involved in the creation of these models, and they have a responsibility to make sure that nothing horrendous occurs as a result of them.”

That statement seems to presume that people like him shouldn’t be making the decisions but that they should be made with consultation with outsiders, as he said at the beginning of the interview. Nevertheless, the decisions are always made by corporations.

People Mean Well But Corporations Answer To Profits

The question that wasn’t asked is that with a few exceptions (like the outdoor clothing company Patagonia), considering that corporations generally aren’t motivated by “human goodness” or base their decisions on ethics, can they be trusted to imbue machines with human goodness?

Despite click bait articles to the contrary, Google still publishes their “don’t be evil” motto on their Code Of Conduct page, they simply moved it to the bottom of the page. Nevertheless, Google’s corporate decisions, including about search, are strongly based on profit.

On the issue of whether AI Search is strip mining Internet websites out of existence, Sundar Pichai, the current Google CEO, struggled to say what Google does to preserve the web ecosystem. That’s the outcome of a system that prioritizes profits.

Is that evil, or is it just the banality of a corporate system that prioritizes profit over everything else, leading to harmful outcomes? What does that say about the future of AI Search and the web ecosystem?

Screenshot of Google’s De-Prioritized Don’t Be Evil Motto

Watch The Interview With Eric Schmidt:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/AYO Production

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Dec 17 2024

Google’s big week was a flex for the power of big tech

Last week, this space was all about OpenAI’s 12 days of shipmas. This week, the spotlight is on Google, which has been speeding toward the holiday by shipping or announcing its own flurry of products and updates. The combination of stuff here is pretty monumental, not just for a single company, but I think because it speaks to the power of the technology industry—even if it does trigger a personal desire that we could do more to harness that power and put it to more noble uses.

To start, last week Google Introduced Veo, a new video generation model, and Imagen 3, a new version of its image generation model.

Then on Monday, Google announced a breakthrough in quantum computing with its Willow chip. The company claims the new machine is capable of a “standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 10²⁵) years.” you may recall that MIT Technology Review covered some of the Willow work after researchers posted a paper preprint in August. But this week marked the big media splash. It was a stunning update that had Silicon Valley abuzz. (Seriously, I have never gotten so many quantum computing pitches as in the past few days.)

Google followed this on Wednesday with even more gifts: a Gemini 2 release, a Project Astra update, and even more news about forthcoming agents called Mariner, an agent that can browse the web, and Jules, a coding assistant.

First: Gemini 2. It’s impressive, with a lot of performance updates. But I have frankly grown a little inured by language-model performance updates to the point of apathy. Or at least near-apathy. I want to see them do something.

So for me, the cooler update was second on the list: Project Astra, which comes across like an AI from a futuristic movie set. Google first showed a demo of Astra back in May at its developer conference, and it was the talk of the show. But, since demos offer companies chances to show off products at their most polished, it can be hard to tell what’s real and what’s just staged for the audience. Still, when my colleague Will Douglas Heaven recently got to try it out himself, live and unscripted, it largely lived up to the hype. Although he found it glitchy, he noted that those glitches can be easily corrected. He called the experience “stunning” and said it could be generative AI’s killer app.

On top of all this, Will notes that this week Google DeepMind CEO (the company’s AI division) Demis Hassabis was in Sweden to receive his Nobel Prize. And what did you do with your week?”

Making all this even more impressive, the advances represented in Willow, Gemini, Astra, and Veo are ones that just a few years ago many, many people would have said were not possible—or at least not in this timeframe.

A popular knock on the tech industry is that it has a tendency to over-promise and under-deliver. The phone in your pocket gives the lie to this. So too do the rides I took in Waymo’s self-driving cars this week. (Both of which arrived faster than Uber’s estimated wait time. And honestly it’s not been that long since the mere ability to summon an Uber was cool!) And while quantum has a long way to go, the Willow announcement seems like an exceptional advance; if not a tipping point exactly, then at least a real waypoint on a long road. (For what it’s worth, I’m still not totally sold on chatbots. They do offer novel ways of interacting with computers, and have revolutionized information retrieval. But whether they are beneficial for humanity—especially given energy debts, the use of copyrighted material in their training data, their perhaps insurmountable tendency to hallucinate, etc.—is debatable, and certainly is being debated. But I’m pretty floored by this week’s announcements from Google, as well as OpenAI—full stop.)

And for all the necessary and overdue talk about reining in the power of Big Tech, the ability to hit significant new milestones on so many different fronts all at once is something that only a company with the resources of a Google (or Apple or Microsoft or Amazon or Meta or Baidu or whichever other behemoth) can do.

All this said, I don’t want us to buy more gadgets or spend more time looking at our screens. I don’t want us to become more isolated physically, socializing with others only via our electronic devices. I don’t want us to fill the air with carbon or our soil with e-waste. I do not think these things should be the price we pay to drive progress forward. It’s indisputable that humanity would be better served if more of the tech industry was focused on ending poverty and hunger and disease and war.

Yet every once in a while, in the ever-rising tide of hype and nonsense that pumps out of Silicon Valley, epitomized by the AI gold rush of the past couple of years, there are moments that make me sit back in awe and amazement at what people can achieve, and in which I become hopeful about our ability to actually solve our larger problems—if only because we can solve so many other dumber, but incredibly complicated ones. This week was one of those times for me.

Now read the rest of The Debrief

The News

• Robotaxi adoption is hitting a tipping point.

• But also, GM is shutting down its Cruise robotaxi division.

• Here’s how to use OpenAI’s new video editing tool Sora.

• Bluesky has an impersonator problem.

• The AI hype machine is coming under government scrutiny.

The Chat

Every week, I talk to one of MIT Technology Review’s journalists to go behind the scenes of a story they are working on. This week, I hit up James O’Donnell, who covers AI and hardware, about his story on how the startup defense contractor Anduril is bringing AI to the battlefield.

Mat: James, you got a pretty up close look at something most people probably haven’t even thought about yet, which is how the future of AI-assisted warfare might look. What did you learn on that trip that you think will surprise people?

James: Two things stand out. One, I think people would be surprised by the gulf between how technology has developed for the last 15 years for consumers versus the military. For consumers, we’ve gotten phones, computers, smart TVs and other technologies that generally do a pretty good job of talking to each other and sharing our data, even though they’re made by dozens of different manufacturers. It’s called the “internet of things.” In the military, technology has developed in exactly the opposite way, and it’s putting them in a crisis. They have stealth aircraft all over the world, but communicating about a drone threat might be done with Powerpoints and a chat service reminiscent of AOL Instant Messenger.

The second is just how much the Pentagon is now looking to AI to change all of this. New initiatives have surged in the current AI boom. They are spending on training new AI models to better detect threats, autonomous fighter jets, and intelligence platforms that use AI to find pertinent information. What I saw at Anduril’s test site in California is also a key piece of that. Using AI to connect to and control lots of different pieces of hardware, like drones and cameras and submarines, from a single platform. The amount being invested in AI is much smaller than for aircraft carriers and jets, but it’s growing.

Mat: I was talking with a different startup defense contractor recently, who was talking to me about the difficulty of getting all these increasingly autonomous devices on the battlefield talking to each other in a coordinated way. Like Anduril, he was making the case that this has to be done at the edge, and that there is too much happening for human decision making to process. Do you think that’s true? Why is that?

James: So many in the defense space have pointed to the war in Ukraine as a sign that warfare is changing. Drones are cheaper and more capable than they ever were in the wars in the Middle East. It’s why the Pentagon is spending $1 billion on the Replicator initiative to field thousands of cheap drones by 2025. It’s also looking to field more underwater drones as it plans for scenarios in which China may invade Taiwan.

Once you get these systems, though, the problem is having all the devices communicate with one another securely. You need to play Air Traffic Control at the same time that you’re pulling in satellite imagery and intelligence information, all in environments where communication links are vulnerable to attacks.

Mat: I guess I still have a mental image of a control room somewhere, like you might see in Dr. Strangelove or War Games (or Star Wars for that matter) with a handful of humans directing things. Are those days over?

James: I think a couple things will change. One, a single person in that control room will be responsible for a lot more than they are now. Rather than running just one camera or drone system manually, they’ll command software that does it for them, for lots of different devices. The idea that the defense tech sector is pushing is to take them out of the mundane tasks—rotating a camera around to look for threats—and instead put them in the driver’s seat for decisions that only humans, not machines, can make.

Mat: I know that critics of the industry push back on the idea of AI being empowered to make battlefield decisions, particularly when it comes to life and death, but it seems to me that we are increasingly creeping toward that and it seems perhaps inevitable. What’s your sense?

James: This is painting with broad strokes, but I think the debates about military AI fall along similar lines to what we see for autonomous vehicles. You have proponents saying that driving is not a thing humans are particularly good at, and when they make mistakes, it takes lives. Others might agree conceptually, but debate at what point it’s appropriate to fully adopt fallible self-driving technology in the real world. How much better does it have to be than humans?

In the military, the stakes are higher. There’s no question that AI is increasingly being used to sort through and surface information to decision-makers. It’s finding patterns in data, translating information, and identifying possible threats. Proponents are outspoken that that will make warfare more precise and reduce casualties. What critics are concerned about is how far across that decision-making pipeline AI is going, and how much there is human oversight.

I think where it leaves me is wanting transparency. When AI systems make mistakes, just like when human military commanders make mistakes, I think we deserve to know, and that transparency does not have to compromise national security. It took years for reporter Azmat Khan to piece together the mistakes made during drone strikes in the Middle East, because agencies were not forthcoming. That obfuscation absolutely cannot be the norm as we enter the age of military AI.

Mat: Finally, did you have a chance to hit an In-N-Out burger while you were in California?

James: Normally In-N-Out is a requisite stop for me in California, but ahead of my trip I heard lots of good things about the burgers at The Apple Pan in West LA, so I went there. To be honest, the fries were better, but for the burger I have to hand it to In-N-Out.

The Recommendation

A few weeks ago I suggested Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso’s appearance on NPR Tiny Desk. At the risk of this space becoming a Tiny Desk stan account, I’m back again with another. I was completely floored by Doechii’s Tiny Desk appearance last week. It’s so full of talent and joy and style and power. I came away completely inspired and have basically had her music on repeat in Spotify ever since. If you are already a fan of her recorded music, you will love her live. If she’s new to you, well, you’re welcome. Go check it out. Oh, and don’t worry: I’m not planning to recommend Billie Eilish’s new Tiny Desk concert in next week’s newsletter. Mostly because I’m doing so now.

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The Download

Dec 17 2024

The Download: AI emissions and Google’s big week

AI’s emissions are about to skyrocket even further

It’s no secret that the current AI boom is using up immense amounts of energy. Now we have a better idea of how much.

A new paper, from a team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, examined 78% of all data centers in the country in the US. These facilities—essentially buildings filled to the brim with rows of servers—are where AI models get trained, and they also get “pinged” every time we send a request through models like ChatGPT. They require huge amounts of energy both to power the servers and to keep them cool.

Since 2018, carbon emissions from data centers in the US have tripled. It’s difficult to put a number on how much AI in particular is responsible for this surge. But AI’s share is certainly growing rapidly as nearly every segment of the economy attempts to adopt the technology.

Read the full story.

Google’s big week was a flex for the power of big tech

Google has been speeding toward the holiday by shipping or announcing a flurry of products and updates. The combination of stuff here is pretty monumental, not just for a single company, but I think because it speaks to the power of the technology industry—even if it does trigger a personal desire that we could do more to harness that power and put it to more noble uses. Read more here.

This story originally appeared in The Debrief with Mat Honan, our weekly take on what’s really going on behind the biggest tech headlines. The story is subscriber-only so nab a subscription too, if you haven’t already! Or you can sign up to the newsletter for free to get the next edition in your inbox on Friday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Mysterious drones have been spotted along the US east coast

People are getting a bit freaked out, to say the least. (BBC)

Although sometimes they’re just small planes, authorities say. (Wired)
Trump says they should be shot down. (Politico)

2 TikTok could be gone from app stores by January 19

Last week, a US appeals court upheld a law forcing Bytedance to divest. (Reuters)

The rationale behind the ban could open the door to other regulations that suppress speech. (Atlantic)
Influencers are putting together their post-TikTok plans. (Business Insider)
The long-shot plan to save TikTok. (Verge)
The depressing truth about the coming ban. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Authorities in Serbia are using phone-cracking tools to install spyware

Activists and journalists found their phone had been tampered with after a run-in with police. (404 Media)

4 Cellphone videos are fueling violence inside US schools

Students are using phones to arrange, provoke and capture brawls in the corridors. (NYT)

5 AI search startup Perplexity says it will generate $10.5 million a month next year
It’s in talks to raise money at a $9 billion valuation. (The Information)

AI search could break the web. (MIT Technology Review)

6 How Musk’s partnership with Trump could influence science

Even if he can’t cut as much as he’d like, he still stands to make big changes. (Nature)

Is “deleting” the IRS his worst idea yet? (Washington Post)
The top cybersecurity agency is bracing for Trump. (Wired)
Trump’s win is a huge loss for the climate. (MIT Technology Review)

7 AI firms will scour the globe looking for cheap energy

Low-cost power is an absolute priority. (Wired)

It’s an insatiably hungry industry. (Bloomberg)

8 Anthropic’s Claude is winning the chatbot battle for tech insiders

It’s not as big as ChatGPT, but it’s got a special something that people like. (NYT)

A new Character.ai chatbot for teens will no longer talk romance. (Verge)
How to trust what a chatbot says. (MIT Technology Review)

9 The reaction to the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s murder could prompt a reckoning

Healthcare’s algorithmic decision-making turns us into numbers on a spreadsheets. (Vanity Fair)

Luigi Mangione has to mean something. (Atlantic)

10 How China’s satellite megaprojects are challenging Starlink

Between them, Qianfan, Guo Wang and Honghu-3 could have as many satellites. (CNBC)

Quote of the day

“We’ve achieved peak data and there’ll be no more.”

OpenAI’s cofounder and former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, tells the NeurIPS conference that the way AI models will be trained will have to change.

The big story

How to stop a state from sinking

April 2024

In a 10-month span between 2020 and 2021, southwest Louisiana saw five climate-related disasters, including two destructive hurricanes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, more storms are coming, and many areas are not prepared.

But some government officials and state engineers are hoping there is an alternative: elevation. The $6.8 billion Southwest Coastal Louisiana Project is betting that raising residences by a few feet, coupled with extensive work to restore coastal boundary lands, will keep Louisianans in their communities.

Ultimately, it’s something of a last-ditch effort to preserve this slice of coastline, even as some locals pick up and move inland and as formal plans for managed retreat become more popular in climate-vulnerable areas across the country and the rest of the world. Read the full story.

—Xander Peters

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ How to make the most of your jigsaw puzzles—try them on “hard mode.”
+ Mr Tickle is a maniac who needs to be stopped.

+ A song about Christmas that probably many of us can relate to, if we’re honest.
+ If the original Home Alone was wince-inducing in terms of injuries, the sequel is even more excruciating.
+ The best crispy roast potatoes ever? I’ll let you be the judge.

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Dec 17 2024

U.S. Lags in Digital Wallet Adoption

PayPal launched the world’s first digital wallet in 1998. Nearly three decades later, the payment method remains a novelty for more than half of U.S. consumers.

J.D. Power’s 2024 “Digital Wallet Satisfaction Study,” published in March 2024, found that just 48% of U.S. shoppers use digital wallets online or offline.

Separately, J.D. Power found only 57% of small and midsize U.S. merchants accept that form of payment.

U.S. Roadblocks

The reasons for slow adoption vary.

J.D. Power researchers noted that the “fragmented and far from mature” U.S. payments market has yet to offer a universal wallet that works across web, mobile, and in-store channels.

Sean Gelles, senior director of payments intelligence at J.D. Power, told Practical Ecommerce, “Digital wallets plateaued at 50% of U.S. consumers and have not changed since last year.”

In a point-of-sale survey, J.D. Power queried roughly 48,000 U.S. non-digital-wallet users from September to November 2023. Their top concerns were:

Security (35%),
Difficult to use (17%)
Habit (16%)

A year later, approximately 22,000 surveyed non-digital-wallet users had nearly identical worries.

“You’d expect speed and convenience would motivate consumers to try digital wallets,” Gelles said. “But consumer attitudes have not evolved; non-users and users don’t fully understand the benefits.”

Security

Gelles was surprised by security fears, stating, “Digital wallets encrypt and tokenize account data and don’t even share it with merchants, but a third of the study’s respondents think they are insecure.”

“We need to educate the U.S. market,” Gelles stated. “Some consumers think digital wallets send their information into cyberspace. Provisioning a wallet is a sophisticated process; my bank does not give anyone my actual card information, not even the merchant.”

Difficult to use

Gelles observed that consumers with less than a year of digital wallet experience had lower satisfaction scores than longer-tenured users.

Speed and convenience are table stakes in the modern economy, Gelles added, stating most small business users believe digital wallets eliminate friction and improve conversions while reducing chargebacks and fraud.

Habit

Wallet providers can do more, Gelles said, to improve customer onboarding and support. Merchants can help customers make informed decisions in the checkout stream. “The key is knowing your customers and providing the best checkout experience possible.”

While 16% of respondents said habit was a roadblock, Gelles observed consistent factors steering customers toward digital wallets. In the 2023 point-of-sale survey, wallet users cited these benefits:

Speed (45%)
Ease (44%)
Merchant acceptance (24%)
Security (24%)

Global Acceptance

Despite slow U.S. adoption, wallets accounted for 50% of global ecommerce-only sales in 2023, according to Worldpay’s 2024 “Global Payments Report.”

The Asia-Pacific region continues to dominate digital wallet adoption, per the Worldpay report. APAC consumers spent over $2 trillion in ecommerce in 2023, representing 70% of the region’s ecommerce transactions and over 64% of global online digital wallet spend. Worldpay researchers predict that other regions will follow APAC’s example.

Tracy Lai agrees. She’s the founding partner of Lystar Group, a New York-based consultancy, and president of Fintech and Finance Alliance, a non-profit member organization.

According to Lai, digital wallets are a staple of daily life in Asia. “Asians are more receptive to digital wallets because they skipped the credit card adoption cycle and went straight into making cashless payments with their smartphones,” she said, noting that most people in the region were happy to trade a bit of privacy for convenience.

Today, digital wallets are a default payment method in APAC, Lai added, for online and offline transactions. She cited a recent example at a coffee shop in Shanghai, where she was surprised to see a standalone digital wallet scanner for WeChat Pay and Alipay.

“When I asked why they didn’t have a traditional point-of-sale device,” Lai stated, “They said the scanner is more convenient and doesn’t charge transaction fees.”

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Dec 17 2024

12 Top Online Form Builders, Compared

Form builders are handy tools for engaging users and collecting info, such as contact submissions, surveys, quizzes, polls, and more. Forms can also capture payment details, notify stakeholders, build automated workflows, and more.

Online Form Builders

Google Forms is the default choice for creating basic forms. Build surveys or quizzes in your mobile or web browser. Analyze responses in real time and summarize results at a glance with charts and graphs. Add custom logic that shows questions based on answers. Open the raw data with Google Sheets for deeper analysis or automation. Free with a Google account.

Paperform is a form builder for creating and maintaining automated forms, e-signatures, surveys, bookings, payments, and more — in more than 700 templates. Customize with built-in Unsplash and GIPHY libraries. Use Paperform’s “products” section to include fields for SKU, price, and minimum and maximum quantities. Use the “calculations” function to compute shipping rates and discounts based on real-time user input. Paperform integrates with Stripe, Braintree, PayPal Business, and Square. Automate your schedule and bookings by connecting your calendar. Access native analytics and connect with Google and Facebook. Premium plans start at $24 per month.

Paperform

WPForms is a popular form builder plugin for WordPress by Awesome Motive. WPForms features over 2,000 templates, smart conditional logic, secure payments, electronic signatures, and advanced security tools. Users can describe what they want in an AI chatbot and receive a working form with customizable contact fields, surveys, registration data, and feedback. The AI form builder can translate entire forms into multiple languages, automatically set up conditional logic on form fields, and tweak or adjust forms afterward. Premium plans start at $49.50 per year.

Typeform is a builder for conversational forms, mirroring real dialog by asking questions one at a time. Call for participants by name and ask follow-up questions in real-time based on their answers. Get a detailed analysis of the results for each form question. To build a form, choose from 28 editable question types and access more than 3,000 templates. Free plan available. Premium plans start at $25 per month.

Formstack lets you quickly build online forms via a no-code builder and AI. Capture leads, collect payments, administer surveys, and more. Formstack is a good option for businesses with strict data procedures, including compliance with GDPR or HIPAA. Formstack offers roughly 40 templates and a dozen customizable themes. Connect with CRMs, backend systems, and more. Formstack also provides an add-on conversion kit to run A/B tests and integrate analytics platforms. It also evaluates a form for accessibility. Premium plans start at $83 per month.

Formstack

Microsoft Forms, part of Office 365, facilitates custom surveys, polls, quizzes, and more. Export data to Excel for in-depth analysis and view live using the Present feature. Add or customize questions quickly with the visual editor. Click the Style button for AI-powered theme suggestions. Visualize data with real-time charts and automatically generated reports. Free with an Office 365 subscription.

JotForm is an easy-to-use online form builder with more than 10,000 templates to cover seemingly any niche. Use the drag-and-drop editor to customize or the advanced editor to go deeper. Automatically send form submissions to CRMs, email marketing services, project management boards, and more with more than 150 integrations. Plus, get paid directly through your form. Free plan offers five forms. Premium plans start at $34 per month.

Wufoo, from SurveyMonkey, is a no-code form builder that collects data, files, and payments. Create registrations, applications, surveys, contact-us, payment forms, and more. Process payments through PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.Net. Create forms from more than 400 templates. Automate workflows with hundreds of integrations and transfer data to a CRM, marketing automation system, and more. Get notified via text or email when someone completes a form. Collect all types of files through your form and access them directly from your account. Free up to five forms. Premium plans start at $14.08 per month.

Wufoo

Zoho Forms, part of the Zoho Office Suite, is a free no-code app to create forms with customizable themes, situation-specific templates, and more than 30 field types — queries, feedback, orders, and more. Sort and view form entries, export them to spreadsheets, or send the data to your preferred apps. Trigger conditional email or SMS notifications whenever a new record is submitted or updated. Zoho Forms is free.

Feathery is a form builder with advanced logic capabilities for creating automated workflows between applications as users interact with the forms. Define custom logic in a natural language and conditionally show elements and steps of a form based on previous field responses. Pull data from APIs and write to in-house systems. Feathery supports 100-plus integrations to CRMs, email, analytics, payments, and project management tools. Free plan for up to five live forms. Contact for pricing on premium plans.

Ninja Forms is another popular form builder for WordPress. Use the drag-and-drop editor to create multi-page forms easily. Add-ons include Advanced Datepicker, Conditional Logic, File Uploads, Multi-Step Forms, and more. Send or export submissions as PDFs, Excel files, and Google Sheets. Send emails from any form to people who need it. Accept PayPal and credit card payments from any form, as single payments or subscriptions. Basic plan is free. Premium plans start at $59.40 per year.

HubSpot Form Builder is part of the popular marketing platform. Quickly create pop-up or embedded forms using the drag-and-drop form builder. Access templates ranging from registrations to ebook downloads and support queries. Choose from 1,000 form fields and a dozen field types. Follow up with automated emails and notifications. Enroll your contacts in lead nurturing campaigns. Automatically add form submitters to your HubSpot database. HubSpot Form Builder is free.

HubSpot Form Builder

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Dec 16 2024

ChatGPT Update: Free Web Search, New Voice & Maps Features via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

OpenAI has updated ChatGPT to make web search available to all registered users. The update also includes voice search and maps integration.

With voice search, you can ask questions about current events and local information in a natural way. This feature works in multiple languages and allows for real-time queries.

Additionally, ChatGPT’s mobile apps now include maps, which can help you find businesses and restaurants near you.

Lastly, for those using ChatGPT as their default search provider, OpenAI has improved its handling of navigational queries.

Search Available For Free

OpenAI announced that the web search feature of ChatGPT, which was previously only available to Plus subscribers, is now accessible to all logged-in users worldwide.

🌐ChatGPT search 🌐is starting to roll out to all Free users today.

Search the web in a faster, better way—available globally on https://t.co/nYW5KO1aIg and our mobile and desktop apps for all logged-in users. pic.twitter.com/yf6GJGAm8b

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 16, 2024

This service can be accessed through chatgpt.com as well as the mobile and desktop applications.

For more on ChatGPT Search, see:

Advanced Voice Search Integration

A key improvement with this update is advanced voice search.

This lets you find current web information through natural conversation.

The system can now handle complex questions, including travel planning and local events. It also supports multiple languages and provides real-time information.

In a video about the advanced voice mode, an OpenAI representative demonstrates how you can have natural conversations with ChatGPT to get information about events and activities.

Search with Advanced Voice in ChatGPT, rolling out over the next week. pic.twitter.com/zCqVM5xJZX

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 16, 2024

For instance, when asked about festive activities in Zurich, Switzerland, for the week of December 23rd, 2024, ChatGPT provided details on Christmas markets, singing Christmas tree concerts, and Circus Kinelli.

The video also shows that ChatGPT can give specific information, like the days and hours of the Christkindlmarkt at Zurich’s main station.

It easily switches to answer questions about family-friendly events in New York City during the same week, mentioning the New York Botanical Garden’s Holiday Train Show and the Bank of America Winter Village at Bryant Park.

Navigational Searches

OpenAI has improved the user experience when using ChatGPT as the default search engine in web browsers.

In another video, representatives from OpenAI explained that the company has prioritized making it faster to navigate directly to websites from the browser’s address bar.

Now, by simply typing in keywords such as “Netflix” or “hotel booking sites,” users can quickly access the most relevant links without needing to sift through lengthy AI-generated responses.

When you use ChatGPT as the default search engine in your browser, we’ve made it faster to get to where you want to go on the web. pic.twitter.com/q5N38GUPjS

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 16, 2024

Maps Addition

OpenAI has added maps to the ChatGPT mobile apps to help you find local restaurants and businesses.

This feature gives you up-to-date information, so you can easily search for and discuss options while you’re on the go.

We’re also adding maps to ChatGPT in our mobile apps, so you can search for and chat about local restaurants and businesses with up-to-date information. pic.twitter.com/bQb4zilq6p

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 16, 2024

In Summary

ChatGPT’s search features – previously Premium-only – are now free for all users.

The update adds voice search and maps, plus better direct navigation to websites.

To use these tools on the web or mobile, you only need a ChatGPT account. Voice search works in multiple languages, and the maps feature helps with local searches.

Featured Image: JarTee/Shutterstock

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Dec 16 2024

Google Warns: Beware Of Fake Googlebot Traffic via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Google’s Developer Advocate, Martin Splitt, warns website owners to be cautious of traffic that appears to come from Googlebot. Many requests pretending to be Googlebot are actually from third-party scrapers.

He shared this in the latest episode of Google’s SEO Made Easy series, emphasizing that “not everyone who claims to be Googlebot actually is Googlebot.”

Why does this matter?

Fake crawlers can distort analytics, consume resources, and make it difficult to assess your site’s performance accurately.

Here’s how to distinguish between legitimate Googlebot traffic and fake crawler activity.

Googlebot Verification Methods

You can distinguish real Googlebot traffic from fake crawlers by looking at overall traffic patterns rather than unusual requests.

Real Googlebot traffic tends to have consistent request frequency, timing, and behavior.

If you suspect fake Googlebot activity, Splitt advises using the following Google tools to verify it:

URL Inspection Tool (Search Console)

Finding specific content in the rendered HTML confirms that Googlebot can successfully access the page.
Provides live testing capability to verify current access status.

Rich Results Test

Acts as an alternative verification method for Googlebot access
Shows how Googlebot renders the page
Can be used even without Search Console access

Crawl Stats Report

Shows detailed server response data specifically from verified Googlebot requests
Helps identify patterns in legitimate Googlebot behavior

There’s a key limitation worth noting: These tools verify what real Googlebot sees and does, but they don’t directly identify impersonators in your server logs.

To fully protect against fake Googlebots, you would need to:

Compare server logs against Google’s official IP ranges
Implement reverse DNS lookup verification
Use the tools above to establish baseline legitimate Googlebot behavior

Monitoring Server Responses

Splitt also stressed the importance of monitoring server responses to crawl requests, particularly:

500-series errors
Fetch errors
Timeouts
DNS problems

These issues can significantly impact crawling efficiency and search visibility for larger websites hosting millions of pages.

Splitt says:

“Pay attention to the responses your server gave to Googlebot, especially a high number of 500 responses, fetch errors, timeouts, DNS problems, and other things.”

He noted that while some errors are transient, persistent issues “might want to investigate further.”

Splitt suggested using server log analysis to make a more sophisticated diagnosis, though he acknowledged that it’s “not a basic thing to do.”

However, he emphasized its value, noting that “looking at your web server logs… is a powerful way to get a better understanding of what’s happening on your server.”

Potential Impact

Beyond security, fake Googlebot traffic can impact website performance and SEO efforts.

Splitt emphasized that website accessibility in a browser doesn’t guarantee Googlebot access, citing various potential barriers, including:

Robots.txt restrictions
Firewall configurations
Bot protection systems
Network routing issues

Looking Ahead

Fake Googlebot traffic can be annoying, but Splitt says you shouldn’t worry too much about rare cases.

Suppose fake crawler activity becomes a problem or uses too much server power. In that case, you can take steps like limiting the rate of requests, blocking specific IP addresses, or using better bot detection methods.

For more on this issue, see the full video below:

Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock

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Dec 16 2024

22 SEO Experts Offer Their Predictions For 2025 via @sejournal, @theshelleywalsh

This year continued with the same theme as the year before – a bombardment of updates and rapid developments in AI.

AI Overviews were introduced in May, which then saw a drop in organic traffic alongside major drops from Google updates.

It’s not been an easy year in SEO.

Whereas last year was considering how AI tools could be leveraged to augment our work, this year has been the acceptance that Google SERPs are changing and not delivering the same levels of organic traffic as before.

This introduction of AIO and the uncertainty of Google organic traffic has accelerated the move towards SEO becoming “marketing.”

Moving forward, SEO is now as much about branding and marketing as it is about what we used to know about SEO.

To make this transition, everything that you were doing in SEO needs to be reconsidered. The future of online marketing will involve being found in generative AI apps, AI-powered search engines, social media, forums, and communities.

The bottom line is that SEO is now marketing, and that could be challenging for anyone who holds on to a one-dimensional SEO mindset.

As is our tradition this time of year, we turned to some of the best minds in the industry to get their thoughts on where the industry is going and what might happen next.

We asked 22 of the best practicing SEO professionals: In your expert opinion, what should SEO pros focus on in 2025 to maintain visibility and get results?

1. Focus On The Fundamentals

Jono Alderson, Consultant at Jono Alderson

Make 2025 the year you actually optimize your website. Forget shiny new toys and focus on the fundamentals.

Fix your errors. Make it faster. Make it more accessible. Improve the UX. Correct the typos. Redirect the broken links. Clean up the mess.

And while you’re at it, trim the fat. Remove the zombie pages that nobody visits. Prune your bloated navigation. Consolidate duplicate content.

Fix those annoying forms that never seem to work. Make your images smaller. Stop auto-playing videos. Test your site on a cheap phone on bad Wi-Fi and see how frustrating it is. Then fix that, too.

SEO professionals are so busy chasing trends, tweaking metadata, and begging for backlinks that we’ve lost sight of what really matters: creating a website that works beautifully for users.

A faster, simpler, cleaner site isn’t just better for people – it’s better for search engines, too. Do the unglamorous work. Google notices, and so does the market.

2. Focus More On UX

Arnout Hellemans, Consultant at Online Market Think

Here are a few tips for SEO pros to focus on in 2025:

Stop focussing on keywords and shift to user intent. Look at SERPs into all the questions users have.

Check the People Also Ask (PAA) features and check if your article satisfies that intent on the page.

Focus more on the UX (usability, site speed).

If you want to get traffic from other AI discovery engines, check your website without JavaScript. You can use SSR or pre-render your webpages, so that other crawlers can consume your content too.

3. Start Considering Awareness And Upper Funnel Metrics

Ryan Jones, Senior Vice President at Razorfish

2025 will be the year when we finally treat SEO like full-funnel marketing.

SEO pros will have to move beyond just measuring clicks and start considering awareness and upper funnel metrics as users less frequently desire websites in favor of AI, instant answers, and other search features.

SEO pros will still be needed to help influence these features and ensure brands show up, but we’ll have to focus on user intents – the queries where users want to do or accomplish something – over high search volumes.

4. Start With Video-First Content

Mark Williams-Cook, Digital Marketing Director at Candour

Over the past 20 years, we’ve consistently seen Google take steps to keep users on their SERP, as it’s more profitable for them.

In its Q3 announcement, it revealed a 90% reduction in the cost of generating AIOs, signaling even more aggressive deployment of these and AI-organized results in ecommerce.

This likely means a decline in traffic to “solved” knowledge and informational spaces – though that’s not necessarily a bad thing for the web (how many lasagna recipes does humanity really need?).

On the other hand, we can expect increased traffic from sources like Google Discover and Lens, particularly for non-text content such as video.

I believe those who rely solely on GenAI to generate content directly from LLMs will struggle.

However, those leveraging LLMs to enhance original material – such as generating transcriptions from video—are positioned to benefit, as this top-down approach now feels even more strategically aligned with current trends.

In 2025, I am going to be encouraging clients to start with video-first content and work backwards, with a special focus on Discover and Lens search, which has now been integrated.

5. Diversify Where Your Community Might Be Spending Time Online

Miriam Ellis, Consultant at Miriam Ellis Consulting

A trend to pay particular interest to in 2025 is the diversity of digital platforms to which your potential customers may be going for local business information and recommendations.

2024 has seen many developments that may not be increasing searcher satisfaction, such as the rise of AI Overviews, which can’t be relied on for factual information, and a growing sense that Google search has become less skilled at intent matching.

I’ve fielded sentiment from a range of users encompassing some of the best SEO pros in the world to everyday searchers stating that it’s simply harder than it used to be for them to find what they’re looking for in Google.

While all the traditional SEO and local SEO skills and work remain relevant, diversifying your picture of where your community might be spending time online will be smart work for the year ahead.

In the U.S., we’ve reached a state in which half our counties no longer have access to local news, so people looking for trustworthy, authentic communications about their community will have to look elsewhere. This could include the big social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, but don’t stop there.

I recommend taking a very good look at Discord to see if it has become a community hub, or if you could turn it into one to increase your neighbors’ awareness of your brand taking an active role in your town or city. YouTube, Reddit, and hyperlocal podcasts are also very strong candidates for contributing to community life.

In summary, while normal SERP visibility will still be essential to your marketing strategy, be sure you’re studying consumers’ shifting behaviors so you can learn to be present wherever they feel information can be trusted.

6. Organize And Structure The Content Hierarchy

Motoko Hunt, Founder & President at International SEO & SEM Consulting

Many SEO pros have been focusing so much on content generation in recent years, especially in 2024 with the help of AI.

It’s time to better organize generated content based on the target audience’s intent and business goals.

Identify the purpose of each content/page on site.
Identify the target audience’s intent and stage for each content.
Group content by topics.
Create a content tree within the group based on the searcher’s intent and stage.

By organizing and structuring the content hierarchy, you can touch searchers at each stage of their journey and influence their decision-making.

You should also update the content as needed. You want your content to stand out in the sea of similar content out there. Make sure that your content adds value.

With this, the content will not just generate traffic but will contribute to the business growth.

7. Build Author Authority And Explore Alternative Traffic Sources

John Shehata, CEO & Founder at NewzDash and Former Global VP of Audience Strategy at Conde Nast

I believe these key areas will be crucial for SEO success in 2025:

E-E-A-T Is King

Google’s emphasis on experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness will be even more critical.

SEO pros need to build Author Authority by showcasing expert credentials and first-hand experience, and digital and social footprint, especially in niches like health and finance (think doctor bios with links to publications).

Strong Domain Authority still relies on high-quality backlinks, but focus on those that drive traffic.

For Document Authority, create in-depth, entity-focused content that satisfies user intent better than competitors. Think comprehensive guides with clear attribution and original research.

AI Is Your Co-Pilot

AI is transforming search. Optimize for AI-generated answers by structuring content around topics and entities.

For example, instead of just targeting “best running shoes,” create content around “best running shoes for trail running” and “best running shoes for flat feet.”

Use AI tools to scale – not to write – content creation, but maintain a human touch for quality and originality. Think of AI as a research assistant and editor, not a replacement for your own expertise.

Diversify To Thrive

Expect fewer Google clicks with all the new SERP updates, and don’t put all your eggs in the Google basket.

Explore alternative traffic sources like Threads, Reddit, newsletters, and even push notifications.

A diversified approach makes you less vulnerable to algorithm updates and opens up new audience streams.

Adapt And Analyze

Stay informed about algorithm updates and adjust your strategies accordingly. Pay close attention to user behavior on your website to identify areas for improvement.

Tools like heatmaps and scroll maps can provide valuable insights.

8. Create More Q&A Content To Be Present In LLMs

Kevin Indig, Growth Advisor and publisher of The Growth Memo

In my opinion, the big question is, “What is the story of your brand in an LLM world?”

Track sales/revenue/leads from LLM referral traffic like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc. See if this could become meaningful when extrapolating the trend from the last six months out over the next two years.

If so, you want to invest in technical SEO to make crawling easier and create more structured content (like Q&A style content) to be more present in LLMs.

9. Index Licensing Will Become Increasingly Important

Jes Scholz, Marketing Consultant at JesScholz Consulting

The Bing index powers ChatGPT (and thus will be integrated into Siri), as well as Microsoft Copilot and many answers of Meta AI.

It’s also leveraged by smaller search engines, including Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia.

While other players, like Perplexity, aim to build their own index, it’s clear that index licensing will become increasingly important as the search landscape diversifies.

This means SEO marketers need to expand their focus beyond Google from an indexing perspective.

Now is the time to revisit Bing Webmaster Tools. Conduct a content audit using XML sitemaps for each page type to compare indexing rates on Bing versus Google.

If either search engine is missing valuable content, prioritize crawling and indexing optimization.

Because no matter the surface – whether it’s in traditional SERPs, AI-powered SERPs, chatbots, Google Discover, Google Shopping, or elsewhere – if your content isn’t indexed, you have no chance to earn visibility.

10. Build Relationships With Other Well-Ranking Sites In Relevant Industries

Glen Allsopp, Fonder at Gaps.com

One recommendation I have for 2025 is to actively study as many of the main search results you’re trying to rank in, see what Google is rewarding, and look to get involved in those sources.

Bear with me – it gets better.

Besides traditional service or shopping pages, there’s a good chance you’ll also see:

Guides recommending products and services.
YouTube videos.
Similar but non-competing brands.
Interviews.
Tweets.
Forum posts.
Reddit posts.

While a simplified goal of SEO is to get more targeted search traffic to your own website, you shouldn’t ignore the possibility of getting more exposure via creating videos, being involved in relevant Reddit communities, and so on.

One of the most effective things I’ve done is build relationships with other well-ranking sites in relevant industries. Even better if you’re in the same space but don’t compete on the end product you’re selling.

You would be surprised how open people are to also cover your product, service, or content when they get to connect with a human who actually cares about what they’re working on.

It’s far from the most important or only thing you should be doing, of course, but it’s always good to expand your marketing horizons.

11. Building And Enriching Knowledge Graphs With Well-Defined Entities Is Key

Andrea Volpini, CEO and Co-Founder of Wordlift

SEO professionals and marketers should optimize for both human and AI audiences, particularly large language models (LLMs).

LLMs excel at processing structured, concise text but often struggle with complex, visually rich websites.

Providing clear, organized, and dense content – such as markdown files or LLM-specific resources like /llms.txt – helps LLMs better understand and represent your brand to users.

Structured data remains essential for search visibility and enhancing AI-driven customer experiences. It enables training models, improving content suggestions, and supporting advanced features like conversational search.

Understanding how LLMs function is equally critical. These models can be interpreted through monosemanticity – the ability to extract precise, entity-like features from their deep neural networks.

SEO pros should focus on creating clear, entity-rich content and evaluating how these entities align with openly distributed models.

Building and enriching Knowledge Graphs with well-defined entities is key. This approach ensures LLMs can effectively contextualize your content, unlocking new optimization opportunities and improving both AI and human experiences.

12. Sit And Sync With Comms

Mordy Oberstein, Founder of Unify Brand Marketing

Let’s define “maximum visibility” for a second. Do we mean as many eyeballs as possible as quickly as possible? If so, I have no tips for you.

On the other hand, if we mean being visible as much as possible in as meaningful a way as possible, then I have one tip for you: Sit and sync with comms.

Be aligned with and on board with your company’s or client’s comms or brand department. Understand where they want to go. Understand how they see the company’s identity, positioning, and the messaging they want to send.

Be a part of that process. Help them align and amplify that positioning and messaging. Help the brand become what it aims to be.

We’re entering a digital winter. There is so much volatility and so much dysfunction (hello, search and social algorithms).

Most of all, there is so much noise. It’s much harder for your audience to tune it all out and to allow themselves to be impacted by what you’re putting out there.

That’s a huge hurdle to overcome. We’ve become inundated and numbed to all of the digital content thrown at us. And we’re only getting more inundated and more numb.

There’s a huge need for resonance. Your content needs to be crafted in a way that can cut through all the noise and resonate.

There’s not a whole lot of point in grabbing as much traffic as possible if it’s not going to be “seen” by the audience.

That old model of garnering as much visibility as possible is outdated. It’s better to be purposeful more than anything. And to do that, SEO pros can no longer afford to be siloed.

Sitting with whoever is running the overall communications strategy is an absolute must. It leads to a healthier approach and better outcomes. It’s what will drive visibility that actually matters.

13. Know Who Your Customers Are, Create Resonant Messages, And Deliver Value

Ameet Khabra, Founder at Hop Skip Media

Fully embrace artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in every part of marketing.

This is about so much more than automating PPC campaigns, though that’s a huge part, especially since Google is retiring manual bid controls like eCPC.

The marketers who will succeed are the ones who can make the most of AI and automation while keeping that human touch to connect with customers.

Build strong first-party (1P) data sets, as third-party (3P) cookies will continue to fade away, and privacy rules will get stricter.

This is all about the information you gather directly from your customers – their website habits, how they interact with your brand, and what they’ve bought.

Those who invest heavily in tools and strategies to collect 1P data will be able to deliver compelling experiences at every point of the buyer’s journey.

You must also incorporate that data into creating experiences that catch your customer’s attention.

Create immersive, interactive experiences that capture attention and spark emotion, and look beyond the screen to voice interfaces, wearables, and wherever your customers engage.

It’s the brands that can create these amazing, human-centred experiences that are going to be the real differentiators.

Finally, create some organizational agility. This is not news, but things are moving fast for us in this industry, and we need to create a culture where ongoing learning and testing are part of the rhythm.

The fundamental rules of marketing remain constant. It is all about knowing who your customers are, creating resonant messages, and delivering value in every interaction.

14. Users And Search Engines Prioritize Trusted Brands

Montserrat Cano, Consultant at MC. International SEO & Digital Strategy

In 2025, understanding your audience and market is key to building brand authority, increasing visibility and driving online leads or sales.

Users and search engines prioritize trusted brands, so consistent branding and high-quality content are essential.

This is especially important in international markets, due to the unique cultural nuances and search behaviours.

Combine this with a solid website that focuses on user experience and accessibility for long-term growth.

15. Communities Can Have A Big Impact On Visibility

Jo Turnbull, Digital Marketing Consultant at Turn Global, Organizer of Search London, and Co-host of SEO Office-Hours

SEO professionals should focus on being part of communities, supporting them or creating ones where there is a gap in the market.

This is particularly important for small brands who do not have a lot of budget to make significant changes to their website.

Communities can have a big impact on visibility, helping to build brands and subsequently conversions.

Through communities, SEO pros can connect with and support one another in initiatives such as mentorship, writing for key sites, as well as attending virtual and/or in-person events.

16. Understand How Users Consume Information

Navah Hopkins, Brand Evangelist for Optymzr

Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, it’s all about understanding how users consume information.

By focusing on non-login forums (Reddit, Quora, etc), and getting indexed on Bing for ChatGPT visibility, brands can bypass expensive and time intensive conventional Google SEO.

Forums often rank better on SERPs and offer a more authentic, human touch compared to traditional websites.

If you plan to promote yourself, make sure you’re honest about it – building an infrastructure for your customers and brand influencers to share on your behalf can serve better.

17. Gain A Foothold In New Trends And Topics Before Larger Competitors

Tory Gray, CEO at Gray Dot Company

There’s a fundamental shortcoming to traditional SEO keyword research that we maybe don’t talk about enough: It’s a lagging indicator.

So, when it comes to identifying new trends, topics, or questions for content, relying on traditional keyword research makes SEO professionals and content strategists late to the game.

That’s especially important for smaller, less authoritative domains. In established industries and verticals, many existing topics are dominated by high-authority competitors.

Gaining a foothold in new trends and topics before larger competitors is one of the few, strong tactics that can help close the gap.

Today, trends and topics take off on platforms like TikTok and Reddit before they make their way to search engines like Google.

In 2025, looking outside of traditional search data – and incorporating platforms where “newness” happens – is how we can tap into leading indicators that let us know which new and useful information our audience really wants.

18. Finding Truly Unique Angles For New Content Will Reward You

Alli Berry, Search Engine Optimization Consultant at Alli Berry Consulting, LLC

Less is more when it comes to your content strategy.

Google has been busy continuing to punish lower-quality pages, so it’s time to cut the robotic-like programmatic and low-quality AI-generated pages that may have given you some short-term gains.

I know everyone says they’d never do that, but the internet suggests otherwise.

I would also be cutting low-performing pages and thin pages because they may be harming the overall quality of your site from a search engine lens.

Finding truly unique angles for new content will reward you, especially if you can incorporate proprietary or 1st party research.

The Google documents leaked suggest that high-quality news links and links from new pages count for more, so anything you can do to drive new external links should reward you.

Also, if you’ve got all of your eggs in the affiliate revenue model basket, it’s time to diversify your business model. Google is coming hard for affiliate sites.

19. Mentions In LLMs Will Emerge As A Key Aspect Of SEO

Olga Zarr, SEO Consultant at SEOSLY

SEO professionals should broaden their focus beyond just Google to include Bing and LLMs, as visibility across all these platforms will likely become increasingly critical.

Mentions in LLMs will emerge as a key aspect of SEO, extending the discipline beyond traditional search engines.

Good rankings in Google will still matter, especially since they will influence mentions in AI Overviews. However, the dynamics shift when considering the leading LLM player, ChatGPT, which relies on Bing for search results in both ChatGPT and GPT-powered search.

This means that strong rankings in Bing will become significantly more valuable. SEO pros must familiarize themselves with Bing’s ranking criteria and closely study its documentation, as its algorithm and priorities differ from Google’s.

For other LLMs – regardless of their data sources – SEO marketers should ensure that the brand they aim to promote is consistently and clearly positioned online.

It’s crucial to communicate what the brand represents and offers, so it becomes a reliable source for LLMs to cite. Cohesive and authoritative branding will play a big role in improving visibility.

20. Do More With Less By Swapping The Fluff For Trustworthy Information

Jamie Indigo, Director of Technical SEO at Cox Automotive Inc.

Visibility in 2025 is all about understanding the context in which your site exists. More content will be created this year than 2010-2018 combined.

In the face of a rapidly expanding internet full of regurgitated AI, Google’s goal of crawling less makes sense. If your site is made of the same content as all the others using that particular AI tool, why bother?

AI-generated content is statistically probable rather than factually accurate. It may lack the depth, nuance, and originality that users seek.

Google’s emphasis on crawling less underscores the need for unique, high-quality content that provides genuine value to users.

This is why your website’s unique context is so important. Smaller sites should have different focuses than large sites.

If your site is greater than 100,000 pages … does it need to be? How much of that content do users actually engage with? This is your time to be intentional about the index.

If it doesn’t solve a real human problem, cut the cruft. Do more with less by swapping the fluff for trustworthy information.

This includes all the bells and whistles on your site to make it as shiny as possible. A feature no one uses is waste. Great content with a bad user experience is still bad content. Even great content is useless if it isn’t relevant to why the user came to the page.

SEO professionals should prioritize trustworthy experiences that fulfill user intent. If you’re answering questions and helping get things done, you’ll see growth.

21. Learn How To “Program Personas” Effectively

Michael Bonfils, Global Managing Director at SEM International

As you already know, SEO professionals who figure out how to combine data, creativity, and AI-driven innovation will be the ones who win.

An opportunity for SEO pros in 2025 will be learning how to “program personas” effectively.

This means taking tools like ChatGPT and other LLMs and feeding them the right inputs – like your target audience’s behaviors, their pain points, and the brand tone – to create AI-driven personas that are specific, strategic, and actionable.

Think of these personas as virtual assistants who can brainstorm and refine ideas with you tailored to your exact needs.

For example, you could program an AI persona to act like a Gen Z skateboarder or a busy CFO and have it generate ideas or strategies that would appeal directly to that group.

This goes beyond traditional keyword research; it’s about having AI provide insights you might not have considered, delivering fresh, relevant angles.

22. Businesses Should Invest In A Strong Internal SEO Product-Oriented Team

Pedro Dias, Founder and SEO Consultant at Visively

SEO professionals should step back and try to understand how their strategies impact the new rules of the game we’re currently playing in search.

There’s a lot of noise around promises of easy traffic at scale that are more designed to catch off-guard anyone not fully aware of what they should be doing, and make money from the less savvy.

That said, the important pillars of SEO remain:

Technical Excellence

Ensuring a site is crawlable and indexable by search engines is foundational – log file analysis, optimizing crawl paths, and resolving technical barriers (e.g., redirects, canonicalization, and URL structures).

Data-Driven Decision Making

Leveraging tools like Google BigQuery to analyze search and performance data — making SEO decisions based on solid data, such as understanding user behavior, identifying patterns in search intent, or assessing technical performance.

Scalability And Sustainability

Building scalable systems and processes that support SEO growth — preventative measures, automation, and frameworks (“Improvements, Prevention, Recovery” models) for a proactive approach over reactive fixes.

Collaboration With Product Teams (For Internal Teams)

Integrating SEO into product and development workflows, highlighting the importance of SEO as a core component rather than a marketing afterthought.

User-Centric Approach

Ensuring SEO efforts align with delivering value to users, as user satisfaction often drives ranking improvements.

I believe it’s more important than ever that businesses seriously invest in having a strong internal SEO product-oriented team.

This will be a game changer for the future as this will increasingly be a factor to differentiate sustained growth better catered when you have a deep knowledge of your product and vertical of operation, rather than the sole reliance on intermittent external collaborators.

SEO in 2025

In a continuation from last year, SEO is changing more rapidly than at any other time in the history of the industry.

As we said at the beginning, SEOs need to change their mindset away from the old way to a new holistic approach that seeks to find visibility where your audience is. Most likely across Google SERPs, Bing SERPs, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Gemini, TikTok, YouTube, all in varying degrees.

Most of the experts agree that focusing on brand and producing quality content that demonstrates expertise is an area of focus.

We also think, removing reliance on Google for organic traffic would be a smart investment to make right now.

More Resources:

Featured Image: jamaludinyusuppp/Shutterstock

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Dec 16 2024

Essential WordPress Plugins Every Site Should Have via @sejournal, @martinibuster

WordPress is the most popular CMS with majority market share. Out of the box, it’s a powerful platform, but it’s the WordPress plugins that really add the functionality and versatility to be configured in many different ways.

The WordPress plugin community is what really brings the platform to life and enables publishers and developers to build websites that enhance the experience for site visitors and publishers.

Based on my own experience and from others in the WordPress community, the following plugins were chosen for their reliability and effectiveness in helping SEOs and marketers grow audiences, increase sales, and improve site security and usability.

Plugin Categories

The following is a list of essential plugins, organized into six categories, that many publishers may find useful.

SEO Plugins: List of top six WordPress SEO plugins.
Site Security: Keeps your site from getting hacked and losing rankings.
Website Backups: Protects websites from mistakes and offers a way to come back from getting hacked.
WordPress Search Engine Plugins: Gives site visitors a better way to find your content and products to buy. Plus, it can improve user engagement and satisfaction signals.
Website Staging: This is a way to protect your site from crashing, as well as to test out improvements and updates before rolling them out to the live site.
Contact Forms: Because it’s important to communicate with site visitors

WordPress SEO Plugins

SEO plugins streamline basic tasks like adding meta descriptions, title tags, article excerpts, and Schema.org structured data.

These are the six most popular SEO plugins, listed by number of installations:

Yoast SEO (10+ million installations).
Rank Math (3+ million installations).
All-in-One SEO (3+ million installations).
SEOPress (300,000+ installations).
The SEO Framework (200,000+ installations).
SEO Plugin by Squirrly SEO (100,000+ installations).

A special note about The SEO Framework:

The SEO Framework caught my attention several years ago for its modular approach, allowing users to activate only the features they needed – a unique method at the time for creating a plugin that won’t slow your website down.

This thoughtful approach continues in the latest versions, which include automation to streamline deployment, helpful suggestions, and accessibility optimizations such as enhanced color contrast for colorblind users, keyboard navigation, and screen reader compatibility.

The SEO Framework is ad-free, privacy-focused, and can import settings from Yoast, Rank Math, and SEOPress.

Premium extensions provide additional features, including local SEO optimizations, comprehensive Schema.org structured data for news sites and bloggers, and more.

WordPress Security Plugins

Site security is often overlooked as a sales or SEO-related consideration. All it takes is to be hacked one time to understand how directly related website security is to publishing and ranking a website.

Read: The WordPress Security Guide To Keep Your Site Safe

Wordfence

Installed on 5+ million websites.

The free version of Wordfence protects a website against external threats by locking down areas of the site that are commonly exploited – and has a malware scan to check for intrusions.

It does things like blocking malicious files from executing in WordPress folders where they commonly hide, sending alerts when plugins and themes need updating, and providing an option to force strong passwords.

It even provides the option for instituting two-factor authentication – previously a Premium feature, now available in the free version.

The standout feature is its firewall. Wordfence’s built-in firewall rules automatically detect and block malicious activities or suspicious user agents.

These blocks are temporary and automatically lifted after a pre-set duration to prevent database bloat. While the firewall effectively blocks external threats, adding custom rules delivers a decisive blow to malicious bots (learn how to use Wordfence custom rules).

Wordfence is also authorized by the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Program as a CVE Numbering Authority. This gives it the authority to contribute vulnerability information that its researchers discover and add it to the CVE® Program, a database of vulnerabilities. I mention this only to show how Wordfence is an authoritative and expert organization.

Over 5 million users trust Wordfence, and for a good reason – it’s easy to configure, and it works.

The Premium version of Wordfence offers a more advanced proactive stance that receives up-to-the-minute threat signatures that protect against newly discovered vulnerabilities.

Sucuri Security

Installed in 700,000+ websites.

Sucuri, which is currently owned by GoDaddy, is a security auditing, malware scanning, and website hardening solution.

It doesn’t duplicate the features in Wordfence, so it can work together with Wordfence as a two-part security solution.

Sucuri features a file integrity scanner that alerts users to changed files, hardens the website against intrusions, and offers security notices like when someone logs in.

The paid version of Sucuri offers a firewall that actively blocks threats.

Using the free version of Sucuri, together with Wordfence, offers an outstanding level of WordPress security.

Patchstack

20,000+ installations.

Patchstack provides 48-hour early warning alerts of security vulnerabilities on plugins and themes, providing an extra layer of protection.

This early warning generally provides users a chance to take proactive action before hackers are able to take advantage of the vulnerability.

Users of the paid version receive real-time alerts and patches to mitigate the vulnerabilities.

Pricing for the premium plugin starts at $5 per month, which makes it a highly affordable solution.

Akismet Spam Protection

Installed on 6+ million websites.

Akismet Spam Protection is used by over 6 million users. It was created by Automattic, which is a for-profit company founded by Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress.

You can count on seamless integration between Akismet and the WordPress CMS.

Akismet is easy to implement to protect contact forms and comment sections. It’s a useful plugin to install on any site that has comments turned on and/or a contact form.

WordPress Backup Plugins

Backing up and archiving a WordPress site is critical to protecting a site from catastrophic failure.

For example, if a site becomes hacked, a complete backup from before the site was hacked will ensure that a site can be restored on a staging server and fully updated with the latest security patches, with a clean WordPress installation, and then restored to the live server.

A backup can save a site from a bad update that crashes the website or a mistake that completely wipes out the important data.

UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup

Installed on 3+ million websites.

UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup plugin is trusted by over 3 million users. It’s an easy-to-use backup solution that makes it simple to roll the site back to a previous version.

I’ve used it to successfully migrate a site from one server to another server. It also helped me recover after pushing the wrong button and deleting my website template. Yeah, I did that once.

Migrating from one server to another is as simple as backing up with UpdraftPlus, setting up WordPress on the new server, adding the plugin to the new installation, and then using it to recover the site from a backup. That’s it.

Moving a site with UpdraftPlus is so easy – it feels like magic.

BlogVault

90,000+ installations.

This plugin offers real-time incremental backup that offers free offsite storage and a 90-day archive. The plugin backs up the WordPress database, themes, plugins, settings, images – everything.

The official WordPress repository page for the plugin advertises that BlogVault is the official site migration plugin for Cloudways, FlyWheel, LiquidWeb, Pantheon, and WPEngine.

BlogVault also provides a free staging environment. The paid pro version offers automation features, one-click recovery, and migration, plus priority customer support starting at $149.

Higher tiers offer built-in malware scans. The free version offers many of the backup and storage functionalities that most websites need.

The free staging capabilities are a strong bonus that may allow users of the free plugin to create a staging site that can be used for testing new plugins and themes before deploying on a live site.

The BlogVault plugin was developed by the same company behind the MalCare WordPress security plugin, which has over 400,000 WordPress website installations. Its products are advertised to be trusted by companies like eBay, Intel, and other enterprise brands.

WPvivid Backup & Migration

600,000+ website installations.

WPvivid enables users to create website backups and can be used for site migrations.

It can also be used to create a staging site on a subdirectory so that new versions of the WordPress core, plugins, or themes can be tested for compatibility before being pushed to the live production site.

The difference between the free and the paid pro version is that the pro version offers incremental backups, exclusion/inclusion rules, partial backups, and crash protection for site migrations.

Both versions offer backups to third-party cloud servers, like DigitalOcean Space, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and other popular cloud storage providers.

The site is trusted on over 600,000 websites. I reached out to the developers, and they confirmed that they are based in California.

The plugin has received over a thousand five-star reviews, indicating the high level of satisfaction users experience.

WordPress Search Engine Plugins

The default WordPress search engine is basic and offers limited functionality.

Its algorithm cannot handle misspellings or use stemming to deliver broader, more relevant results, which can harm user experience and reduce sales.

Replacing it is essential for serious websites. The following plugins address these limitations and should be considered essential for many WordPress websites.

Relevanssi

100,000+ installations.

Relevanssi is a free WordPress search plugin that offers features that other plugins charge for.

For searching, it offers sorting by order of relevance (in place of date) partial word match, supports the “and,” “or,” and quotation mark exact match search operators.

The search results can be set to display excerpts that show the context of the search result on the page (shows the passage) and highlight the search terms on the webpage when users click through. The plugin also integrates with WPML and Polylang.

The developers of the plugin note that it uses “hundreds of megabytes” of database space. They suggest taking note of the current size of the wp_posts database table and tripling it to understand how much server storage space will be required.

The paid Pro version contains the “Did you mean?” feature, enables search results with PDF, including taxonomy (navigational data), and weighs search results.

What’s especially useful about the paid version is that it offers stemming, which is a natural language processing feature that allows search results to match the topic of the page instead of just ordinary keyword matching.

This allows a wider range of relevant search results that don’t necessarily contain the exact match keywords. It also has the happy side effect of reducing the size of the search index.

The annual fee is $109 USD, but there’s also a lifetime deal of $379 USD, which includes lifetime support and upgrades.

Ajax Search Lite

80,000+ installations.

This plugin replaces the default WordPress search box that can search in posts, pages, and custom post types like events, portfolio items, and WooCommerce products. It can search in titles, descriptions, article excerpts, and custom fields.

A handy feature is the ability to exclude specific categories and posts. Plus, it can integrate with Google Analytics. It’s also multilingual-friendly and compatible with Polylang, QtranslateX, and WPML.

The paid pro version adds support for popular page builders, supports more kinds of content (PDF, Events Calendar, etc.), and WooCommerce plugin, plus many other features.

A lifetime license starts at $49.

SearchWP

50,000+ installations.

This paid search plugin is popular with developers and publishers. Pricing at the time of writing is on sale for $99 per year.

The algorithm used by this plugin can prioritize frequently clicked search results, allows custom weighting, has an include/exclude feature, and can index custom fields, PDFs, media files, and custom post types.

There are also ecommerce optimizations that can include results from product attributes and taxonomies and are compatible with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and BigCommerce plugins.

Pricing currently starts at $99/year.

WordPress Website Staging

Website staging is a function that allows users to create an exact copy of a website and then make changes to test if the website functions normally without any glitches.

It’s useful for testing a site before updating the WordPress core, plugins, or themes. It’s also useful for previewing what a website would look like with a new template, debugging, and customizing it.

WP STAGING WordPress Backup Plugin

100,000+ website installations.

The free version of the WP STAGING plugin enables users to clone their website to a subfolder of the website, including the database.

The clone can be used for staging a website, as well as for backup and migration.

The pro version of the plugin enables users to back up the website to third-party cloud providers and offers advanced site migration capabilities.

The free version of the plugin advertises that it’s so lightweight that it can even be used on a low-powered shared hosting environment. The paid version of the plugin starts at $93 per year.

WP Stagecoach

WP Stagecoach is a paid premium solution that offers an easy way to stage a website safely on the WP Stagecoach servers and then push it to the live production server when it’s ready.

I’ve used WP Stagecoach and found it to be simple and convenient.

Pricing starts at $99/year.

WPvivid And BlogVault

WPvivid and BlogVault both offer website staging capabilities in addition to backing up websites.

Scroll up to the WordPress Backup Plugin section to read more about WPvivid and BlogVault.

Theme Switcha

Installed on 6,000+ WordPress sites.

This is a plugin for theme developers and not really for the average user.

The software developer created this plugin for their own website projects and subsequently released it for free on the official WordPress plugin repository.

This plugin enables theme previews for logged-in users and can be restricted to admin-level users. It’s a way to preview a theme and see what it looks like. Developers like it because it’s an easy way to show clients a redesign.

Emphasizing that this is a developer-focused plugin, the software developer cautions that it doesn’t work with Gutenberg blocks, although some users have reported that it works. The plugin author writes:

“Please understand that this plugin should not be used together with WordPress features such as Gutenberg Block Editor, Theme Customizer, Widgets, Menus, and other theme-related options. Doing so may result in private changes being made public on the current active theme.”

The plugin was developed by Jeff Starr of Plugin Planet, which offers free and paid WordPress plugins that are used by over 1.5 million users.

A review published in the private Dynamic WordPress Facebook group (membership necessary to view post) noted that it enables the convenience of staging a website for reviewing a template without having to clone files or reproducing it on another server.

Contact Form WordPress Plugins

There are many contact form options to suit a wide variety of website needs.

While a theme’s built-in contact form is often sufficient, third-party plugins offer significantly greater functionality and customization.

WPForms (WPForms Lite)

Installed on 6+ million sites.

WPForms is a basic contact form that’s easy to use and that I have experience with. It doesn’t deliver the ultimate configurable contact form, but if all you want is an easy-to-deploy contact form, this is for you.

It integrates easily with over 200 apps, including page builders like Divi and Elementor.

There are different paid version levels, each providing increasingly sophisticated features and abilities.

The free version is a fine solution when all you need is a contact form.

Ninja Forms

Installed on 700,000+ websites.

Ninja Forms is another easy-to-use contact form builder – but this one has increasingly complex functionalities.

What’s attractive about Ninja Forms is that it uses a modular approach that allows one to purchase add-ons that extend its functionality. Paid add-ons include functionality like multi-step forms and conditional logic.

That said, the free version of Ninja Forms has options that are premium features on other contact forms.

For example, it is Akismet and Google ReCaptcha friendly and can accommodate uploads, accept payments via PayPal and other gateways, integrate with MailChimp, Constant Contact, multiple CRMs, and more.

It’s a good choice to start with and expand on available features as the site grows.

Formidable Forms

400,000+ website installations.

Formidable Forms is perfectly named because it is impressive, has a large number of features and capabilities, and is capable of accomplishing far more than many other contact forms.

It’s more than a contact form because it also functions as a lead generation form builder capable of creating quizzes and surveys.

An especially attractive feature is that it creates WCAG/A11Y compliant forms, which means that it is accessible.

The free Lite version is a highly capable form builder. The premium version of Formidable Forms extends the plugin with lead generation features and other advanced capabilities.

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is a paid contact form that offers extensive advanced features that are useful for sites with complex needs and integrations.

Gravity Forms markets itself as a form manager that is useful for data capture. It’s strongly suited for marketing campaigns and monetization.

Even the Basic version has strong integrations with services like SendGrid, HubSpot, Emma, and MailChimp.

Useful WordPress Plugins

Which plugin is the “best” is determined by what functionalities are needed.

The WordPress ecosystem offers thousands of plugins that extend the functionality of websites to help them rank better, generate more sales, create a better user experience, and contribute to why WordPress is the No. 1 CMS choice in the world.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Krakenimages.com/Shutterstock

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