The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

October 19, 2025
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Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by +39.5K SEOs.
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A deconstruction of the Goldmine system

​What Is ‘Goldmine’? Google’s Quality Judge For SERPS Leaked​
​Shaun Anderson
​While analyzing the internal documentation from Google’s Content Warehouse API leak, Shaun found a previously unknown system codenamed “Goldmine”, a component-based scoring engine; with a primary function to ingest a collection of text candidates for a SERP element – such as a page title – and compute a quantitative score of its quality.

"A core, unified Google philosophy for SERP construction. It’s not about optimising isolated HTML tags; it’s about winning a holistic, internal competition for every single piece of information shown to a user... Google has created a scalable “quality evaluation pattern” that it applies universally."

Long due

​Microsoft Bing finally supports the data-nosnippet HTML attribute​​
​Danny Goodwin / Search Engine Land
​Bing finally joins Google, supporting the data-nosnippet HTML attribute, which allows you to mark specific sections of a webpage so they don’t appear in Bing Search snippets or AI-generated answers.

Let's see how it impacts engagement and traffic

​Google Adds AI Previews To Discover, Sports Feed Coming​​
​Matt G. Southern
​Google rolled out AI trending previews in Discover and will add a “What’s new” sports feed to U.S. mobile search in coming weeks:

"We’ve rolled out an upgraded AI-powered feature in Discover that helps you stay up to date on trending topics you care about. It’ll show brief previews that you can expand to see more information, plus links to continue exploring content on the web."

Supports only one subscription price per landing page

​Google Merchant Center Now Supports Physical Goods Subscriptions​
Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable
​Google has updated its Google Merchant Center policies to now allow for the sale of physical goods subscriptions. Google said this "will be available to all eligible Shopping ad merchants in the United States."

For merchants to use this, they need to update their product feed with the subscription cost attribute and its associated sub-attributes.

Reddit Answers is used by more than 6 million people

​Reddit expands its AI-powered search to 5 new languages​​
​Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch
​Reddit announced Thursday that it is expanding its AI-powered search experience to five new languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Users who have set one of these languages as their default, instead of English, can now chat with the AI in question-and-answer format. Reddit uses a Google AI model to power the feature.

It was a matter of time

​Google to expand ads in AI Overviews to more markets​​
​Anu Adegbola / Search Engine Land​
​As expected, Google will roll out ads within AI Overviews beyond the U.S. to select English-speaking markets by the end of 2025. Google’s gradual rollout will give advertisers and users time to adapt to new ad placements and formats; and could provide early insights into how generative AI changes ad visibility, performance, and measurement across Search.

I expect many of these to be announced soon

​Walmart Partners with OpenAI to Create AI-First Shopping Experiences​​
​Walmart ​
​Walmart announced a new partnership with OpenAI that will start with allowing customers and members to soon shop Walmart through ChatGPT using Instant Checkout: "For many years now, eCommerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses. That is about to change. There is a native AI experience coming that is multi-media, personalized and contextual."

More AI Overviews everywhere

​Google is aggressively increasing the number of AIOs in People Also Asked questions​
​Mark Williams-Cook / AlsoAsked
​They have over doubled in three months from 18% to 38% of English queries.

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A comprehensive XML Sitemaps guide

​Next-Level Sitemaps: Advanced Strategies and Creative Uses for SEO​
​Eleni Tarantou / Women in Tech SEO
​Eleni explains how to keep sitemaps updated, break them into manageable chunks, boost canonical signals, and even gain insights into competitors’ strategies.

It’s not the tech that holds you back; it’s the silos

​Soft Skills are the Hard Skills in Enterprise SEO​​
​Jojo Furnival / Search‘ n Stuff
​The real SEO roadblocks at enterprise level aren’t technical. They’re human: Workflow and governance management, cross-department collaboration, fighting for engineering resource. Learn how to address them with Jojo in this guide.

An actionable GA4 presentation

​Tracking User Journey for SEO in GA4​
​Bengü Sarıca Dinçer
​Bengü explains how to set up custom events and see users' journey using funnel exploration to uncover what’s happening behind your traffic's curtains.

• Related: GA4 Missteps to Avoid by Kyle Rushon McGregor​

Some of the Insightful SEO IRL Presentations

• ​Scalable Keyword Clustering and Content Briefs with Python and AI by Amin Foroutan​
• ​Truth, Not Traffic: How to Win AI Search by Steve Toth​
• ​Google's new AI Search Engine will radically change our lives by Marie Haynes​
• ​From Pagerank To AI: Reverse Engineering Google’s Algorithm With Data Science For SEO by Brie Moreau​
• ​How to Build an AI Search Optimization Roadmap - Criteria and Steps to Take by Aleyda Solis​

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Google is going all in with their AI Search PR efforts

​Google Explains Next Generation Of AI Search​​
​Roger Montti / Search Engine Journal
​Google’s Robby Stein said that there are three essential components to the “next generation” of Google Search: AI Overviews, Multimodal search, and AI Mode. He goes through them in this must-read interview.

• Related: The Google Exec Reinventing Search in the AI Era - An Interview with Liz Reid by Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins ​

For this study, they analyzed 8,500+ prompts

​New Data Study: What Queries Is ChatGPT Using Behind The Scenes?​
​Chris Long / Nectiv
​Chris analyzes search behavior in ChatGPT so we can better understand what strategies will work to optimize for them: How Many Fan Out Queries Does ChatGPT Use? How Frequently Does ChatGPT Use Search By Industry? How Do Query Fan Outs Change By Industry? And much more!

A must read step by step if you're in ecommerce

​How to Create an Intelligent Store: Transforming E-commerce with Knowledge Graphs, Search Intelligence, and AI Agents​
​Gianluca Fiorelli
​Gianluca explains how to construct a unified knowledge graph, connect to the customer’s mind with search Intelligence, integrate search intent to the keyword graph with named entity recognition, and more in his latest guide.

• Related: Optimizing for ChatGPT Shopping: How product feeds power GEO by John Morabito​

It increases snippet consistency and improves contextual relevance

​How Structured Data Shapes AI Snippets And Extends Your Visibility Quota​​
​Andrea Volpini
​What if your page doesn’t “offer” itself in a machine-readable form? That’s where structured data comes in, not just as an SEO gig, but as a scaffold for AI to reliably pick the “right facts.” Andrea explains how.

Authority Boosts AI Visibility, But Only Beyond a Threshold

​Do Backlinks Still Matter in AI Search? Insights from 1,000 Domains [Study]​​
​Margarita Loktionova
​Backlinks are important for AI visibility, but quality and authority matter far more than quantity: High-quality backlinks matter more than sheer volume, nofollow links have nearly the same impact as follow links, image-based backlinks can be just as powerful as text links. Learn about these and more findings in this study.

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• ​SEO Lead at HugeInc ​
• ​SEO Manager at Vanta​
• ​SEO Specialist at Leafly ​
• ​Strategist, SEO at Amsive ​
• ​Director of SEO at Hostaway​
• ​Growth SEO Manager (Business) at Revolut ​
• ​Organic Growth Strategist at Omniscient Digital ​
• ​Interim Senior SEO & ASO Specialist at Farfetch​

Join the next SEOFOMO x Similarweb Meetup in London

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Don't miss the free SEO meetup featuring 3 panels about SEO trends, AI Search, and Digital PR for Branding with experienced SEO specialists; giveaways, drinks, food, and fun networking in the Similarweb office in London on November 20, 2025 from 6 to 9pm.

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