New in Conductor: Search Intent & Hreflang from Sitemaps

See stronger performance with rich insights on audience goals, comprehensive monitoring across your technical implementation, and much more.

The intersection of AI and search is reshaping how brands connect with audiences. In fact, 85% of respondents in our 2025 State of SEO Report predicted AI will positively impact SEO this year—and we're already seeing this in action. Brands use it every day to answer questions at a scale and speed humans can’t match.

And when they’re using AI purpose-built for website optimization, like Conductor, it’s connecting the dots across millions of search signals to give them a richer understanding of what audiences want and show you exactly how your website content can deliver it.

Conductor’s latest upgrades help you at every stage of your content process — from AI-powered intent insights during topic research to advanced hreflang detection as you monitor published content — to ensure you’re capitalizing on every chance to make a strong impression.

Align your content with audience search intent

Build a richer understanding of what your audience is trying to accomplish with each query by seeing search intent insights in Explorer. When you enter a topic in Explorer, Conductor’s best-in-class research solution running on our 25B keyword index, our engine instantly uncovers semantically related keyword suggestions and classifies them into four intent categories: informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional.

Informational intent reveals users seeking to learn about a topic in depth, while navigational means users are searching for a specific website or page. Further down the funnel, commercial intent involves users in the research phase of the decision-making process, comparing products or services and weighing their options. Transactional intent signals users are ready to complete an action like making a purchase or signing up for a service.

Unlike other tools that just use simple natural language processing (NLP) techniques like phrase-matching, Conductor’s proprietary classification methodology looks at more advanced predictive factors like what SERP features appear, the types of content ranking, and journey stage data. You’ll access more accurate intent insights that capture the nuance of different search variants – equipping every content contributor with valuable audience intel.

Monitor hreflang implementation from the XML sitemap

Managing multilingual websites requires careful attention to hreflang implementation to ensure the right content reaches the right audience in every region. When hreflang tags aren't properly implemented, search engines are not sure which content you want to serve, leading to issues that negatively impact visibility, engagement, conversions, and potentially revenue.

Conductor Website Monitoring provides the most comprehensive website insurance policy in the market, monitoring your hreflang tags whether they’re implemented in the page HTML or XML sitemap. You’ll have a clear view of any issues and opportunities for each international market you operate in. And the best part? You can find this expanded scope of insights reflected wherever you go to check up on hreflang. From the Pages tab you can filter all your content to just those with specific hreflang variants, you can go to Issues to zoom in on implementation opportunities by website segment, or design custom alerting so you catch implementation changes in real-time.

Let’s say you’re a healthcare company that operates throughout North America and Europe. An issue with your hreflang implementation in your sitemap causes audiences in Mexico to be served German-language content, and you don’t notice it for weeks. In that time, traffic drops, bounce rate spikes, and your biggest competitor is siphoning your business.

In an increasingly competitive search landscape, with zero-click search already taking a toll, it’s a risk international brands with multilingual sites can’t afford to take. Luckily, our monitoring engine runs 24/7, keeping an eye on all your global content around the clock to protect your website performance and maintain the best experience.

Jump from insight to action with Writing Assistant shortcuts

Content inspiration can strike at any moment during your research—whether you're exploring new topics or tracking your brand’s most valuable terms and queries. When you and your team spot a specific opportunity, you want to be able to act quickly, without losing momentum by having to manually navigate between feature areas and then re-do steps.

Now, we’ve made it easier for you to jump into content creation by adding new Writing Assistant shortcuts throughout Conductor Intelligence – practically anywhere you see a keyword. For example, if you’re researching a topic in Explorer and discover a semantically related term with a promising monthly search volume (MSV), simply click the three-dot icon next to it and select “Go to Writing Assistant”.

From there, we’ll take you directly to Writing Assistant while our content engine automatically starts learning from that keyword’s search engine result page (SERP) to see what makes the top-ranking content successful. In seconds, without another click, you’ll have a full set of prescriptive insights and guidance for how to build high-quality content for that topic.

Tailor your strategy with state-level keyword tracking

If your brand does business in the United States, creating content that performs in each state can be challenging if you’re not clear on how search interests, behaviors, and competitors vary across each one. Without visibility into these state-by-state differences, and whether it’s your content or another brand’s that’s showing up, you’re losing a critical chance to reach local audiences and will inevitably miss out on potential engagement.

Gain precise data on your regional performance and opportunities with state-level keyword tracking in Conductor. By tapping into state-level insights, your brand can ensure it’s on top of local trends that could shape your campaign or product strategy. Plus, you’ll be able to see the markets where your content is driving results, and where it’s not, so you can invest your time and resources where it can have the strongest impact.

Send a login reminder to every user, from one place

​​Getting your entire team following the same process – leveraging the same high-value insights and recommendations for every project they tackle – is the key to consistently producing high-performing content. But when team members aren’t logging in to the technology they have access to, and go off script with their own custom-built workflows, your brand has no visibility into what steps they took, how long it took, whether it’s following best practices, or how to improve results next time.

To make it easier for you to maintain team-wide adoption, and see the strongest results the first time around, we’ve added a Remind button to the User Management table. If invited users haven’t logged into the platform, admin-level users can now send a quick reminder from the same screen they manage user permissions. Just check for any users marked as "Invited," and with one click, give them a gentle nudge to get started.

Experience reliable reporting with SRSLTID parameter removal

Google Merchant Center (GMC) lets businesses upload product data to appear in Google Shopping and product result types. For clear reporting, teams can enable Google to auto-tag URL parameters like search result source listing ID (SRSLTID) so they know whether traffic comes from a GMC or organic results. Recently, Google has mistakenly applied SRSLTID parameters to organic results, causing confusion as SERP crawls will pick up multiple ranking pages (just parameterized URLs) for the same term and falsely detect cannibalization.

Conductor’s advanced engine makes sure you always have accurate, reliable insights by automatically detecting and stripping this parameter from URLs in our keywords and analytics datasets. If we identify a page with the parameter, we’ll preserve the portion of the URL coming before it so your SERP reporting is consistent with the experience before Google’s bug occurred.

See your visibility in AI-generated People Also Ask results

Google continues to roll out more AI-generated search experiences throughout its results. In addition to the standalone AI Overview (AIO) that you’re likely familiar with, sitting at the top of the SERP, AIOs are now showing up within the People Also Ask (PAA) results as well. With this change, there are also multiple URLs referenced within each question instead of just one.

Powered by our next-gen data infrastructure – allowing us to flexibly adapt to the latest search experiences – Conductor now classifies content referenced within PAA-nested AIOs as PAA results. For teams that need to understand the visibility of their content, this classification best captures where and how content is showing up and might be experienced by audiences. Plus, we will only record the first referenced piece of content within each PAA question as the URL that “owns” it. Enjoy an accurate and precise view of how your content’s positioned on the SERP so you can prioritize with confidence.

Drive stronger results with confidence

Surviving in today's search landscape requires a deep understanding of your audience, your visibility, and how to build content that resonates. These latest enhancements reflect our commitment to giving you smarter, more reliable insights that your brand's strategy can depend on.