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π¨ Your SEO & AI Search News and Updates [SEOFOMO - Oct 25, 2026]
Sundar Pichai describes a future in which an agentic layer connects Googleβs Search and AI experiences, bringing information discovery and task completion closer together. "Does the agentic layer have a place for referral traffic comprised of humans, or will the balance shift toward AI agents and websites become a quaint thing of the past?"
A new home to manage your business presence across Google
Google is gradually rolling out Business Home, a beta experience bringing together Business Profile, Merchant Center, YouTube, and Ads accounts. Barry shares screenshots of its tools for managing locations, posts, reviews, performance, and more.
Taking your site offline to patch PHP? Make sure the HTTP response says so
Google recommends returning a 503 status during temporary downtime, with the response served outside PHP if needed. Keep robots.txt accessible and downtime short: URLs returning server errors for several days can eventually drop from the index.
Remember to use percent-encoding for non-English characters in rule paths
Gary Illyes and Chery Prommawin explain what robots.txt supports, including rules for international characters and AI crawlers. A useful reminder to validate URL encoding, use the correct user-agent tokens, and check how each crawler interprets your directives.
βοΈ Sponsor Highlight: AirOps
Learn from the Experts Shaping the Future of AI Discovery
AI search changed the interface, not the job. Three recent AirOps webinars with Kevin Indig, Ross Simmonds, and Eli Schwartz reach the same conclusion: the goal is to be chosen, not just mentioned.
Kevinβs data shows ranking #1 for your fan-out queries earns 58% of citations, four times more than rank #10.
Ross analyzed 380,000 B2B answers and found two separate internets: Reddit and YouTube lead on Google surfaces, while off-site product and comparison pages lead inside the assistants.
Eliβs point for leaders is that every asset needs a conversion path, and mid- and bottom-funnel content is where pipeline gets built.
The brands that win treat owned content, placements, reviews, and community as one system, not five channels with five owners.
The SEOFOMO Organic & AI Search Tracker Leaderboard
Which top sites are gaining and losing organic search traffic and how are their rankings, SERP features, AI Overviews, and AI search visibility changing with it? Introducing the SEOFOMO Organic & AI Search Tracker Leaderboard: a free resource to quickly track these shifts in one place powered by Letaido with Ahrefs data. Check this week's top trends:
Gianluca explains why AI search should also be assessed through its potential contribution to brand positioning and consideration... rather just its referral traffic. He connects marketing principles with practical measurement, while distinguishing visibility from evidence of business impact. A must-read piece for a broader AI search assessment that goes beyond the usual performance metrics and criteria we've used in SEO.
Cyrus goes through why Google might discount links and which characteristics could make them more valuable, drawing on Googleβs API documentation and other evidence. He discusses source trust, relevance, unique information, and editorial independence, with practical implications for your link acquisition strategy.
Your SEO reporting should explain how visibility contributes to the business
Gianluca Fiorelli, Abby Gleason / Advanced Web Ranking
Gianluca and Abby discuss measuring SEO and AI search through conversions, revenue, brand demand, and customer feedback alongside traffic, while explaining how real customer questions can inform prompt tracking and help search optimization teams focus their experiments on meaningful opportunities.
Learn how to improve your outreach starting with what journalists actually
Vince analyzes journalist targeting, sending domains, subject lines, and AI email summaries. Learn what influence journalists seeing your pitch ... or not.
Does your technical SEO report show what has improved over time?
Learn why traditional SEO audit reports often fail to show progress. Mike shares a framework for making technical SEO progress clearer to clients through crawl comparisons and advanced ways agencies can use SEO audits to strengthen client relationships.
π€ Latest AI Search Insights
Learn to set relevant processes & controls for AI automations quality
Aleyda Solis, Sam Torres, Lazarina Stoy, Alfonso Moure / Crawling Mondays
Watch Sam Torres, Lazarina Stoy, and Alfonso Moure and yours truly going through the best ways for using AI workflows to scale AI search optimization while maintaining quality... yes, it's doable.
A complete list of AI search resources to bookmark
A comprehensive aggregation featuring guides and resources going through AI search access, content, brand information, measurement, and platform differences from +200 search specialists.
Include AIO citations in your branded search reporting
Yulia from SE Visible found AI Overviews in 82.5% of checks across its sample of 1,000 US brand keywords, compared with 40.4% in Germany, with 62% of the brand pages AI Overviews cite not ranking in the top 10.
Learn how the four AI chatbots differ in what they recommend
Connor and Sean analyzed 174,142 answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode, and Perplexity for restaurant queries in 55 US cities. The study goes through repeated recommendations and highly rated restaurants that were left out, showing why local AI visibility needs its own assessment.
ChatGPTβs follow-up questions show the product details buyers need
Rankscale found follow-up forms in 79.4% of 7,313 ChatGPT answers to buying prompts across Germany, the UK, and the US. Budget appeared in 87.1% of those forms. Learn how these questions and their preselected answers can influence product content and prompt testing.
Take The Technical SEO in the AI Search Era in 2026 Survey and Get the Chance to Win a Tumbler & Hoodie
How are technical SEO priorities and workflows changing as AI search and AI tools evolve? If youβre a technical SEO or an SEO who does technical SEO activities as part of their tasks, then this survey is for you!
It will only take 5 minutes to answer the questions, itβs anonymous and it will allow us to better understand the challenges and trends when doing technical SEO.
The results will be shared for free in the SEOFOMO newsletter and Website on November 1st, 2026. You have until October 30, 2026 to fill it out.
Need more incentives? When answering the survey you can also opt-in to participate in the giveaway of an SEOFOMO tumbler and hoodie.
What are the top trending PR campaigns at the moment? Finchling's Trending PR Campaigns feature the best PR campaigns ranked by coverage and per industry, now with campaign type and emotions filters!
Spotted a search feature you havenβt seen before? Check your screenshot against the screenshots SER published over the years. The tool finds the closest examples, with dates and the stories behind them, so you can see whether itβs really new.
Tech SEO Connect / Durham, USA / Β£16.96 / November 5-6, 2026
Tech SEO Connect is a two-day event entirely dedicated to helping you learn more about technical SEO and connect with like-minded peers from across the world, featuring Krishna Madhavan, Michael King, Jori Ford, Darwin Santos, Sam Torres, Jamie Indigo, Aleyda Solis, Cindy Krum, Ray Grieselhuber, Metehan Yesilyurt, and more!
Register now with a 50% discount with the code: ALEYDASOLIS50
The Conference Formerly Known as SEO Week is back! Join other executives who are deciding how their brands will be found, trusted, and chosen as AI reshapes the way buyers discover and evaluate companies. Featuring Mike King, Krishna Madhavan, Dan Petrovic and more.
π Attend Tech SEO Connect for Free by Participating in the Free Ticket Giveaway
Refer fellow search marketers to the free SEOFOMO newsletter and each verified new subscriber you bring in gives you one additional eligible entry in The SEOFOMO Global Search Community Giveaway - The Road to 50K Challenge. Learn more and start referring now.
Get your unique SEOFOMO referral link below and see how many referrals you have to participate in the giveaway:
SEOFOMO is a weekly free newsletter sent to +45,000 subscribers with the latest SEO and AI Search news, updates, guides, tips, free tools and jobs. Avoid missing any worthy SEO & AI Search update and subscribe now!