The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

June 28, 2026
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Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by +45.1K SEOs.
Today's sponsors are Conductor and AirOps. Ask to advertise here.​

🕊️ In memory of Bruce Clay, the Father of SEO

This week, the SEO community mourns the passing of Bruce Clay, one of the pioneers of the SEO industry. Through his work, teaching, tools and books, Bruce helped shape SEO into the discipline many of us work in today.

Rest in peace, Bruce. Thank you for everything you gave to the SEO community. Read more here.​

Noticed an unusual volatility this week? A spam update was released.

Google released and completed the rollout of the June 2026 Spam Update

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

It's time to check your organic search rankings and traffic fluctuations: Google released the June 2026 Spam Update on June 24th and rolled it out in only 2 days, finishing on June 26th.

Robots.txt compliance is now easier to monitor.

​Microsoft Clarity Now Surfaces Robots.txt Violations in Bot Analytics​

Ihab Rizk / Microsoft

Microsoft Clarity’s Bot Analytics now shows when bots request URLs disallowed by robots.txt, including trends, operators, bot names, and affected paths. Very useful to understand which bots aren't respecting your access rules.

How Google reports AI search impressions in Search Console.

​Google’s Mueller Explains How AI Search Impressions Get Counted​

Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal

John Mueller clarified that AI Search impressions are counted when links to your site are shown in AI Overviews or AI Mode. If a link only appears after user interaction, the impression counts only after that interaction.

News publishers have new subscription-linking rules to review.

​Google Creates Subscription Linking For News Publishers​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

Google published new policy documentation for Subscription Linking in Google News Reader Revenue Manager, covering violations, eligible surfaces, abuse reporting, and content policies. Worth reviewing if you use subscription linking.

Google’s official reminder: fundamentals still matter in AI Search.

​Google: Good SEO is good GEO​

Brendon Kraham / Google

Google reinforces that AI Mode and AI Overviews rely on its core quality and ranking systems. The advice: focus on helpful, expert, non-commodity content and business outcomes instead of trying to game AI systems.

Markdown is not a magic AI SEO shortcut.

​Google Cautions Against Markdown Versions Of Websites For AI SEO​

Roger Montti / Search Engine Journal

John Mueller and Martin Splitt warned against creating separate Markdown versions of websites for AI SEO. It adds maintenance and debugging complexity; better to make your existing HTML pages accessible, structured, and useful.

The On-Page AEO Checklist: Structure Your Pages to Be Cited by AI

On-page SEO still applies in AI search, but the fundamentals need to evolve. LLMs read and chunk pages differently than Googlebot does, and the brands earning citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews are the ones structuring content specifically for machine extraction.

Conductor's On-Page AEO Checklist breaks down exactly what to optimize, page by page, including:

• How to format sections so LLMs can extract and cite them without losing context
• Which schema types matter most for AEO, and how to avoid hiding content behind JavaScript that AI crawlers can't render
• A bot-by-bot analysis of GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and others, and what to allow vs. block

It’s a tactical, no-fluff reference for the SEOs and AEOs doing the actual work.

Your SEO reporting needs to speak the language of business.

​How To Define & Report SEO KPIs That Actually Move The C-Suite​

Adam Heitzman / Search Engine Journal

Adam explains how to report SEO through business KPIs like organic pipeline, assisted revenue, CAC, ROI, and sales impact, especially when traffic and rankings alone no longer tell the full story.

CTR benchmarks still matter, but only with context.

​Google CTR Stats – Changes Report for Q1 2026​

Dan Popa / Advanced Web Ranking

Dan calculated the CTR averages for each position in Q1 2026 and compared them with those retrieved for Q4 2025. “The first five positions’ clickthrough rates for desktop queries increased by a combined 10.54 pp”. Learn more about this and more CTR changes per device across industries in this research.

Domain migrations rarely recover as fast as stakeholders expect.

​Only 27% of domain migrations recover in 90 days​

Dan Taylor / Salt agency

SALT analyzed 1,052 domain migrations and found that only 27% recovered within 90 days, with a median recovery time of 304 days. A useful benchmark to set migration expectations, plan risk mitigation, and avoid judging success too early.

A broader discovery experience.

​Evolving Search into Human Experience Optimization ​

Gianluca Fiorelli, Laura Iancu

Gianluca Fiorelli and Laura Iancu discuss what SXO actually demands of practitioners: a clearer understanding of users, how they move across platforms, and the signals that help brands become trusted, discoverable, and easy to understand. A must read.

AI visibility impact doesn’t always show up as direct traffic.

​The Downstream Impact of AI Visibility​

Similarweb, Adelle Kehoe, Rand Fishkin

Similarweb and Rand Fishkin analyzed real user journeys after ChatGPT conversations and found that AI-influenced users return to search to find the brands and engage more deeply on the site. A must read research showing the impact of AI visibility.

Own your facts, in plain HTML.

​How ChatGPT Actually Picks Sources (I Read the Network Traffic, Not the Outputs)​

Suganthan Mohanadasan

Suganthan analyzed ChatGPT’s network traffic to understand how it fetches and uses sources: "ChatGPT isn’t a search engine, so stop optimising for one. It reads your own page for the facts, if it can parse them, and everyone else’s for the opinion, and only when the question is worth a search. Build for that."

AI recommendations start with entity understanding.

​Google’s LLM patent suggests a new goal for SEO: Teaching AI who you are​

Rich Sanger / Search Engine Land

Rich analyzes a Google patent showing how AI systems may understand businesses, brands, products, and entities; showing the importance to make it easy to understand who you are, what you offer, and why you’re trustworthy.

Google cites Reddit's translations at industrial scale.

​Translated Reddit Is Winning AI Citations​

Metehan Yesilyurt / Peec AI

Metehan analyzed 64M+ Reddit citations and found that in many non-English markets, Google AI answers cite machine-translated English Reddit threads. Local content now competes with global community discussions too.

Technical SEO Tips for AI Search

Ranking at the top of Google no longer guarantees you show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or AI Overviews. AI search discovers, renders, and cites pages on a different system than traditional SEO, and strong pages are getting left out without a clear signal as to why.

On July 9 at 11am ET, Jairo Guerrero, Founder and Head of Strategy at Organic Hackers, joins us for a tactical session on the technical reasons it happens and what to fix first.

You'll learn:

• Why Google rankings and AI citations are not the same system
• What happens between crawl, retrieval, rendering, and final citation
• The first technical checks to run when pages are missing from AI answers

Live on Zoom. A recording goes to everyone who registers.

• ​Local SEO Lead at Wonderly​
• ​SEO Specialist at Amplifyed​
• ​SEO Strategist at Geeky Tech​
• ​SEO Success Manager at Botify​
• ​Growth Content Manager at Cresta​
• ​Head of SEO at North Star Network​
• ​Growth Marketing Specialist at Rancho BioSciences​
• ​SEO & GEO, Senior Account Manager at Seer Interactive​

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• 5 Community Experience Winners who will join an exclusive virtual SEO & AI Search group Q&A session with Aleyda Solis and WTSFest London 2027 Recording Ticket.

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The campaign started on May 31st, 2026 and will end when SEOFOMO reaches 50,000 verified subscribers, or on December 31st, 2026, whichever comes first.