The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

August 17, 2025
​Subscribe Now​

Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by 38.6K SEOs.
Today's sponsor: JetOctopus. Want to advertise? Ask here.​

It's time to become a preferred source in Top Stories

​Google launches Preferred Sources in the U.S. and India​
​Duncan Osborn / Google Blog​
​Google has launched "Preferred Sources" in Top Stories in the US and India, a new feature allowing users to select their preferred news sources to see more of their articles prominently displayed within Top Stories.
​
Established brands will certainly have an advantage with this feature, and although this might seem like a great idea to give a more personalized experience from already trusted publications to the user, it could also backlash with an echo chamber like effect, making it even harder to smaller, independent players to compete as well. Let's see what happens!

What to do if you're a publication?

Ask your users / readers to add your site as a preferred source in Top Stories, you can add a deeplink to your social posts or a button that Google provides on your site alongside other social call to action.

​I go through it here.​

Yup, SEO is not dead

​GPT-5 Made SEO Irreplaceable​
​Dan Petrovic / Dejan​
​Dan explains how OpenAI has decided to focus toward “intelligence and reasoning” in model weights, while leveraging retrieval-augmented methods (tools, search, plugins, large contexts) to pull in fresh information as needed... making SEO Irreplaceable.

The next step towards Google flights search domination

​Google Introduces Flight Deals: an AI-powered flight search tool​
​Jade Kessler / Google Blog
​Google has introduced flight deals which is going to be released in the US, Canada and India over the next week. It's an AI-powered search tool within Google Flights with a conversational search feature, allowing to describe travel characteristics to obtain relevant results, without relying on the use of filters, using what Google describes as advanced AI to understand the nuances of what's searched for and identify matching destinations.

What do I think?

This release will end up further establishing Google as one of the biggest online search travel players worldwide.

This might be something many who don't work in the travel sector don't realize: In the last couple of years, the Google Travel Hub under google(.)com/travel/, allowing to search for flights, hotels and even holiday rentals has been growing so much in the US that it's now attracting almost the same organic search traffic as Kayak and over players like Skyscanner.

​Check this and more Google Travel insights.​

It's time to pay a closer attention to your web server log files

​Google May Be Using a Generic & Undocumented Google Crawler​
​Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable​
​Google may be using a more generic and undocumented googlebot. The crawler user agent is just named "Google," and it is not listed in any of the documented crawlers that Google has provided.

It would be *great* if AI platforms made it easier to get the data

​Microsoft: SEOs Need To Study Clicks To Conversions From AI Search​
​Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable​
​Fabrice Canel said, “Higher-quality results reduce unnecessary clicks, leading to more effective clicks… In my view, this topic deserves more research, more studies from the SEO community".

Yes, it deserves more research. Yes, it would be great to have better ways to do it via more data from AI search platforms too.

In case you needed any more confirmation

​Google Confirms That AI-Generated Content Should Be Human Reviewed
​Roger Montti / Search Engine Journal
​Gary Illyes said that AI-generated content should be subjected to editorial oversight to ensure it's correct and accurate.

Make the content *actually* helpful, to address your customers doubts

​How much content do top-ranking eCommerce category pages really have? [2025 study]​
​James Brockbank / Digitaloft​
​In case you needed any proof about buying guides not belonging on category pages, and why you should use instead a concise description along with targeted FAQs, avoiding generic questions and tailoring the content to your USPs.

AI should help, not replace you

​Use AI to Improve Content Audits (not perform them)​
​Ian Lurie
​Ian goes through why general purpose AI can’t perform content audits but it can improve and accelerate them, sharing 16 ways to use it.

Let's learn about SEO in China

​International SEO Insights from China with Natalia Witczyk​
​Natalia Witczyk, Gianluca Fiorelli / Advanced Web Ranking
​Learn how Baidu’s black-hat culture influences SEO practices in China, the impact of platforms like WeChat, and the keys about doing SEO in China with Natalia in her insightful interview with Gianluca.

Get the SEO buy-in you need

​How To Speak the Language of Your Top SEO Stakeholders — Whiteboard Friday​
​Helen Pollitt / Moz
​Are your SEO proposals getting lost in translation? In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Helen discusses why SEO language often falls short with senior leaders and how you can better communicate the value of your work to get approval and support.

Say goodbye to low-effort publishing

​The implosion of the blogging-for-dollars revenue model​
​Carolyn Shelby / Search Engine Land​
​Ad-first publishing is collapsing, reshaping search, hosting, and the tools behind the blogging boom. Carolyn goes through it and what’s coming next.
​

​

AI bots decide whose content appears in AI-generated answers, and whose gets left out.

​

With JetOctopus Log Analyzer, you can identify how AI bots interact with your site, understand what works, and apply those insights to shape a winning SEO strategy. See the real picture:

• Track how ChatGPT, OAI SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot crawl
  your site
• Check if your pages are being used as a source for AI answers
• Discover which sections AI bots visit most, and which they ignore

​
Experiment and win: Update your content, structure, or strategy — and instantly see how it impacts AI bot visits and your chances to appear in AI results with the help of Jetoctopus.

​

A must read resource to understand AI Search

​The AI Search Manual​
​Michael King, Annie Cushing, Garrett Sussman, et al. / iPullRank

iPullRank has launched the AI Search Manual, a comprehensive AI search resource including 20 Chapters of detailed and actionable guides going through how AI Search surfaces content and how to optimize for them, featuring insights from Michael King, Annie Cushing, Garrett Sussman, and more!

Ok. I'll say it again: Check. your. log. files.

​LLMs.txt – Why Almost Every AI Crawler Ignores it as of August 2025​
Flavio Longato
​Flavio audited 30 days of raw CDN logs for 1,000 Adobe Experience Manager domains to see which AI crawler requests the file. “LLM-specific bots stayed away. No GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or similar were seen at all”.

It's not just a single reason

​Is AI cutting into your SEO conversions?​
​Kevin Indig / Growth Memo
​Kevin goes through the loss of TOFU traffic, platform and channel shift, attribution loss and the economic change driving the cut of SEO conversions.

LLM search is expanding rather than replacing traditional one

​How LLMs are Changing Search and Audience Habits
​Harry Clarkson-Bennett / Leadership in SEO​
​Harry explains how LLMs aren't destroying search but have given users more flexible options to solve longer, more complex queries that search engines cannot do; with generative searches and therapy / companionship leading the way.

In case you needed more proof of the above

​I Analyzed 1827 Real User Prompts from ChatGPT – Here What I’ve Found: Agentic Search Will Be The New Hype​​
​Metehan Yesilyurt​
​Metehan found a high share of task-oriented ChatGPT queries he analyzed were related to code and development, users were also leveraging AI for high-intent, specific commercial inquiries, and instructing the AI to “act as” an expert to frame the response. Learn more about these use cases and more, along with SEO actions to take in this comprehensive analysis.

The (AI Personalized) future of the SERPs

​Google Web Guide: How It’s Reshaping The SERP And What It Means For Your SEO Strategy
​Andrea Volpini / Search Engine Journal​
​Andrea explains why Google's Web Guide is a glimpse into the future of how knowledge shall be discovered and consumed and how it works.

What does it take to perform in AI answers in Real Estate?

​Real estate + AI search: Does top performance in Google’s organic results contribute to LLM visibility for real estate websites?
​Simon Schnieders / Wix​
​Simon analyzed “Homes for sale" top organic search performers visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek and more, assessing the importance of brand strength, sentiment, consumer preferences among other characteristics beyond organic rankings.

How much do you know about JS SEO for AI Search?

​Survey: JavaScript SEO in the era of AI Search​
​Sitebulb
​Sitebulb is updating its JavaScript SEO Report for the AI Search era. Answer seven questions and let's see how much the industry knows about it. ​
​

​

• ​Digital Marketing Account Manager at Rankings.io​
• ​SEO Strategist at Valve and Meter​
• ​Senior Manager, Growth Marketing (Paid Search & SEO) at Compassion International​
• ​SEO Consultant at Botify​
• ​Director, SEO at VaynerMedia​
• ​Senior Product Manager, SEO at Yelp​
• ​SEO Lead at 12100 Collective​
• ​SEO Content Manager at Zoom​