March 2026 release notes: Improve your Google rankings with Topic Research | New PDF Summary | New Platform Optimization Report | Updated layout in Settings → Sites for better readability

Product updates and new capabilities released to the Siteimprove platform in March. Designed to enhance your experience and help you achieve more with ease and efficiency. 

The March release includes:

1. Improve your Google rankings with Topic Research 
2. New PDF Summary: Quickly understand the state of your PDFs 
3. New: Platform Optimization Report
4. Update: Improved layout in Settings → Sites
5. New CMS plugin version for Optimizely CMS
6. Updated PDF Accessibility Checker

1. Improve your Google rankings with Topic Research 

We’ve recently added several new SEO capabilities to help you better understand and compete in Google search results. In January, we introduced SERP X‑Ray, Competitive Heatmap, and Site-level Heatmap (opens in a new tab). Now, we're excited to introduce the fourth feature: Topic Research.  

New SEO feature: Topic Research

Topic Research shows the broader topic model behind a target query — the related topics, entities, and search variants that help define how search engines understand the subject. Our patented topic model is built from relationships identified across hundreds of documents, producing a broader representation of the topic than approaches that rely only on a small set of top-ranking pages.

When a URL is included, this view also shows how frequently each topic is mentioned on the page, making it easier to compare the page’s current coverage against the broader topic landscape.

This view helps to:

• Prioritize related topics by relevance to see which concepts are most closely connected to the main topic.
• Use search volume as a demand signal to identify related topics with meaningful search interest that may warrant stronger coverage.
• Use CPC as a commercial signal to understand which topics may have higher business value.
• Review trend data to see whether interest in a topic is stable, rising, or declining over time.
• Explore variants to understand how searchers phrase closely related ideas and where wording or intent may differ.
• Compare page mentions against the topic model to see which important topics are strongly represented, underrepresented, or missing from the page.

Together, these signals help evaluate what matters about a topic and how well a specific page reflects that topic model. This makes Topic Research useful for identifying coverage gaps, refining content focus, and balancing audience demand, business value, and topical completeness.

These features are available to customers with a Keyword Intelligence subscription.

2. New PDF Summary: Quickly understand the state of your PDFs 

A new PDF Summary is now available in Accessibility → PDFs → PDF Audit. 

This summary provides a clear overview of the current state of your PDFs by highlighting key metrics including:

• Total number of detected PDFs
• Number of inaccessible PDFs
• PDFs missing tags
• PDFs that are not machine-readable

Improved issue clarity: "Heading structure is incorrect."

We've also enhanced the user experience for the accessibility issue "Heading structure is incorrect." To make it easier to understand why the issue is flagged, the interface now displays:

• The current heading tag detected 
• The previous heading tag detected in the document

This added context helps you remediate the issue without needing to open the PDF in an external tool.

3. New: Platform Optimization Report

The Platform Optimization Report is a concise overview of the state of your Siteimprove account. You can request the report via your Customer Success Executive.

In your report, you’ll find:

• A clear overview of your current modules and usage
• An overview of the consultancy hours in your service plan
• Your average DCI scores over the past six months and quick win opportunities
• Recent product updates you might have missed
• What’s new in our Learning Hub to help your team upskill faster
• Recommendations for CMS Plugins, integrations, and API to enhance your platform experience

4. Update: Improved layout in Settings → Sites

We’ve updated the Settings → Sites page to improve readability and make better use of screen space. Key site details now appear in a new right-hand side panel that opens on demand, keeping the main table clear and easier to work with.

What’s new

• Site summary: The new right‑hand side panel now shows detailed site summary information. The Site summary is no longer shown on initial page load. 
• Account summary: The previous Account summary section has been removed. Its information is still available elsewhere in the platform: 
  • Total pages stored: Now shown in the Subscription overview.
  • Total number of sites: Now visible in the totals displayed at the bottom of the Sites table.

Why this change

We received feedback that the large summaries at the top of the page made the Sites table harder to read and work with. 

This update:

• frees up screen space
• makes the table cleaner and easier to read
• keeps detailed site information available when needed through the new side panel.

5. New CMS plugin version for Optimizely CMS

An updated version of the Siteimprove plugin for the Optimizely CMS is now available: Siteimprove Optimizely Plugin 4.3.3 (opens in a new tab).

This release improves stability and aligns the plugin with Siteimprove’s latest SDK capabilities, ensuring consistency across content management system (CMS) integrations and enabling future enhancements. 

• More accurate content analysis: Updated checks improve the analysis of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, providing more reliable results based on rendered content.

• Improved highlighting in pre-publish mode: Enhanced selector logic ensures more precise highlighting of issues directly within the content.

• The pre-publish check button is now embedded directly in the CMS plugin under the Pre-publish view tab aligning UX with other Siteimprove integrations.

6. Updated PDF Accessibility Checker

We’ve released an updated version of the PDF Accessibility Checker with improved performance.

Important behavior change

This update automatically re-checks all PDFs in your account. As a result, you may notice changes in the number of detected accessibility issues displayed in the PDF table.

What you’ll see

• PDFs that are still being re-checked will display a small circle around the issue count, indicating that processing is in progress.
• You can choose to manually trigger a re-check at any time using “Crawl PDF”, or simply wait for the full re-crawl to complete in the background.