SEO research and tooling workflow

If you're a local business, check this right now. Go to bing.com slash webmasters, hit Get started, create an account, then grab your site from Google Search Console, and boom.

Click on AI performance, and you can see the keywords you're showing up for and the pages that are getting recommended. If you want more help showing up in AI results, comment SEO.

If you do anything on social media, Google just dropped the most important announcement of 2026. For the first time ever, you're gonna be able to see actual data about how your social media posts performed on Google Search.

You'll be able to see exactly what people typed into Google before your social media post appeared, where your post ranked in the search results, and how many people clicked through. This is all coming to Google Search Console in the next week.

Google Search Console has always been by far the best data source for SEO, and now we're finally getting it for social. But TJ, why would I care about how my social media posts are performing in Google?

I'll tell you why. First of all, the traffic you get from Google is the highest value traffic you can get.

It's people who are currently searching for exactly what you're talking about. If you're a brand, this is often someone specifically searching for the product or service you sell.

And you can probably get a lot more traffic from search than you think. You just haven't been focusing on SEO on social...

we'd be getting a ton of traffic. There are going to be some real opportunities to increase how much traffic we get from search, and I'll explain how to do that in a second.

But that's not even the main reason you should be excited about this. The main reason is that social media posts can influence AI responses.

But before you can influence AI responses, you have to show up in a search engine. So any data that helps you more reliably show up in search engines is also gonna help you more reliably influence AI responses.

Specifically, getting the AI to recommend your brand instead of your competitors. All of this is rolling out this week, so let me explain how to set it up and then how you can use that data to rank better.

Go to Google Search Console and then in the top left choose Add a property. Once this is set up, in addition to being able to connect your website, you will also be able to connect your Instagram, X, TikTok, and YouTube account.

By the way, if you haven't yet connected your website domain, do that first...

you're getting a lot of impressions but not a lot of clicks, it means if you were just ranking a bit better, you would be getting a lot of clicks. Take note of the types of terms you're getting a lot of impressions for.

These are the first terms you want to optimize for. They're your biggest opportunities.

You can either optimize whatever existing post is already getting those impressions, or just make a new post. Optimize for those terms.

Google is already telling you they trust your channel for this term. But how do you optimize for a term on social media?

It's easy. You just put that term at the front of your title, caption, or tweet.

That's it. Do that and you'll be doing social media SEO better than 99% of people.

Holy guacamole. Google Search Console is showing performance from Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube.

If you are making videos, you can use Google Search Console to see people finding your videos from search. Same with X posts.

These are the most clicked websites in Google. They all take video.

This is a slow rollout, but if you want to see if you have it, go to Google Search Console, click this part, click Add property. If you have it, it will show up here.

Then all you'll have to do is verify ownership. Absolutely massive.

If you are any sort of creator, this is huge.

AI SEO has nothing to do with your website. Until you really get that, everything that you're doing for SEO is just not gonna work.

It's not gonna align. You're not gonna get mentioned by AI search engines.

That's just a fact. The whole optimising a page, building some links to it, wait until it ranks for certain keywords.

That is completely out. AI search engines aren't ranking pages and websites, they're mentioning brands.

You need to completely shift this mentality of, is my product page optimised for this search keyword, to, is my brand known for this topic, these products, these services. You are going from building an SEO strategy to building a brand reputation.

I know this sounds really disheartening, but it's actually a good thing. It's not like your website has to have super high authority, or you have to have loads of blog posts, or you're not gonna show up in search.

Now it's everywhere that your brand shows up. So you could have a really good presence on socials...