The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

Sep 13, 2026
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Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by +46.2K SEOs.
Today's sponsor is AirOps. Ask to advertise here.​

Google and the EU agree on compliance, but not on who benefits from it

​Google warns of lower quality as it revamps Europe search results to avoid EU fines​

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters

Google rolled out changes to its online search results in Europe to comply with DMA requirements that it ‌said will degrade users' experience and ratchet up costs for European businesses. Google called it “the largest reduction in quality” in its 29 year search history.

Merchant Center is finally showing merchants how their products surface in AI search

​Google Merchant Center AI Performance Now Shows AI Search Intent, Terms & Attribution​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

Google has expanded its Merchant Center AI Performance Insights with AI Search intent, AI Search terms, and AI attributes. The new sections show how products match AI searches and recommend terms and missing attributes merchants can add to improve their visibility.

The AI race is triggering an unusual moment of agreement

​Anthropic CEO urges AI companies to slow model development amid fears over misuse​

Anusha Devang Shah / Reuters

Dario Amodei is calling on AI companies to pace model development, introduce permanent third-party safety evaluators, and coordinate on industry standards. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk publicly agreed with his call for greater caution.

People Also Ask is becoming another AI Overview surface

​Almost 100% Of People Also Ask Results Are Answered By Google AI Overviews​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

AlsoAsked found that 97% of People Also Ask answers in a 19.2 million query English language sample were AI generated during the first week of September, up from 86% in August.

Agentic AI is moving from answering questions to acting across your accounts

​Meta debuts its Muse AI agent. Will consumers trust it?​

Sarah Perez / Techcrunch

Meta has introduced Muse, a US focused personal AI agent that connects with apps and services to send emails, book travel, complete forms, create plans, and make purchases. It will be available through the web, mobile apps, and WhatsApp, but its success will depend on whether users trust Meta with the extensive personal access these tasks require.

A new conversation on how high-growth marketing teams operate

Marketing leaders are under increasing pressure to deliver more: higher pipeline targets, changing buyer behavior, and limited resources. But the teams growing fastest right now are operating under a very different set of conditions.

That's why we're sharing an upcoming conversation for marketing leaders: The New Rules of Growth.

Krithika S. was the first marketing hire at Stripe and at OpenAI, building both marketing functions from the ground up. She now leads marketing at Thrive Capital, working with founders across the portfolio on growth. She's joined by Christy Roach, CMO at AirOps, who has held marketing leadership roles at AssemblyAI, Airtable, Asana, and Gusto. Together, they're veterans of high-growth culture, having been early employees at companies like Stripe, OpenAI, Asana, Gusto, and Airtable.

On September 17 at 10am PT / 1pm ET, they'll break down results from the Marketing Leaders Reality Index and discuss how high-growth teams are changing the way they:

• Hire and design their teams
• Allocate budget and resources
• Prioritize initiatives
• Measure success and report performance
• Make the case for additional budget and headcount
• Operate with greater leverage as growth demands increase

Go deeper into the operating principles that set high-growth teams apart, and what you can apply to your own team to accelerate growth and secure more resourcing.

The webinar is free.

Expert analysis of Google's ranking factors

​Google Ranking Factors Expert Survey 2026​

Cyrus Shepard, Dawn Shepard / Zyppy Signal

Cyrus and Dawn asked 131 SEOs what factors are most important for ranking on Google in 2026. According to the answers, the most important ranking signals in 2026 are relevance (57.1%), backlinks (54.8%), and content quality (47.6%).

Start with one repeatable, verifiable workflow, not an all-purpose SEO agent

​How to build your first AI SEO agent (full walk-through)​

Chris Hanna / Semrush

Chris provides a step-by-step guide to building an agent that checks Google Search Console data, conducts keyword research through the Semrush MCP, clusters topics, and generates content briefs.

• Related: Building AI Skills for SEO: Where to Keep a Human in the Loop by Jojo Furnival​

Digital PR’s value now extends to the sources AI systems trust

​Two Truths and a Lie About Digital PR​

Debbie Chew / Moz

Debbie explains why brands don’t necessarily need an agency to execute digital PR and introduces her CIDER framework for turning customer intelligence and proprietary data into differentiated, newsworthy campaigns.

Precision in a dashboard is not the same as certainty in the data

​When Attribution Looks More Precise Than The Data Behind It​

Bengü Sarıca Dinçer / Search Engine Journal

Bengü argues that attribution reports look precise, but much of that data is modeled, not measured, and confusing the two can quietly misallocate marketing budget. She shares that one attribution model is not enough, and teams that communicate measurement limitations clearly tend to make better decisions over time.

LinkedIn posts are becoming search assets, not only social updates

​"I Tested and Tracked 60 LinkedIn Posts Ranking in Google & AI Overviews. Here's What The Top Performers Have in Common."​

Steve Toth

Steve analyzes 60 LinkedIn posts appearing in Google’s top results and tracks their presence in AI Overviews to identify the characteristics shared by the strongest performers.

AI is joining the shopper journey, not replacing search

​The State of Ecommerce 2026​

Similarweb

Similarweb analyzes how AI and traditional search interact across ecommerce journeys. AI appeared in 11.4% of the shopping journeys analyzed, up from 4.5% in July 2024; among journeys involving AI, 89% also included search, and AI appeared as a middle touchpoint in 76%.

AI visibility without business impact is an incomplete measurement story

​How to Measure AI Search Visibility Impact and Business Success [Video]​

Aleyda Solis, Kevin Indig, Bengü Sarıca Dinçer and Max Woelfle / Crawling Mondays

Learn about the principles, top mistakes, best resources and do's and dont's to effectively measure your AI search optimization visibility and real business impact with Kevin Indig, Bengu Sarica Dinçer and Max Woelfle.

A successful page check is one retrieval signal, not proof of citability

​Checking a Page is Part of a Retrieval Pipeline for AI​

Chris Green

Chris explains how to assess page access and retrieval when AI platforms provide no Search Console like indexing reports, and why checking whether an AI system can access a page should be treated as one observation within a wider retrieval diagnostic process.

Search intent is now fragmented by platform, format, and interaction

​How AI Is Reshaping Search Intent – What 2 Studies Reveal​

Clara Soteras / Search Engine Journal

Clara shares how search intent is fracturing beyond informational, navigational, and transactional, and how two new studies show what AI Mode and AI Overviews are doing to user behavior.

AI search doesn’t make technical SEO less important, it raises the cost of ambiguity

​Tackling Technical Debt, Query Drift, and Site Architecture for AI Search​

Gianluca Fiorelli, Grant Simmons / Advanced Web Ranking

Gianluca and Grant discuss the guardrails that keep programmatic SEO from spiraling into thin, penalized content, and explain query drift, the subtle way pages and entire sites drift away from their real topical expertise.

Here’s how to spot common AI risks and put practical guardrails in place

​How to build an AI governance framework for SEO​

Laura Iancu / Search Engine Land

Laura shares how to spot common AI risks and put practical guardrails in place: a set of principles everyone actually reads, a clear line on data, what can and can’t touch an AI tool, and more.

• ​SEO Manager at Postman​
• ​Content Writer at iPullRank​
• ​SEO Specialist at Honest Digital ​
• ​SEO/GEO Team Lead at Siege Media ​
• ​Demand Generation Manager at Seer Interactive​
• ​GEO Consultant at KKP.agency (Germany) at KKP​
• ​Senior SEO Lead at Nationwide Transport Services​
• ​Digital PR / earned media freelancer for NFL data studies at Fanspeak​

LA SEO Meetup at #LATechWeek

A special edition of the LA SEO Meetup during #LATechWeek on October 15, 2026 is here, bringing together the community with two SEO and AI Search panels, featuring Celeste Gonzalez, Jordan Koene, Aleyda Solis, Itamar Blauer, Eric Wu, and more! RSVP now.