The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

November 30, 2025
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Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by +40,400 SEOs.
Today's sponsor is Advanced Web Ranking. Want to advertise? Ask here.​

Is ChatGPT Shopping using Google Shopping?

​OpenAI has introduced shopping research in ChatGPT​
​OpenAI
​OpenAI is introducing shopping research, a new feature in ChatGPT that researches on your behalf to help you find the right products.

ChatGPT’s shopping research is essentially a shopping assistant, for in-depth, comprehensive research, that allows the user to perform the process with higher accuracy and personalization within the ChatGPT platform. Yet another step to becoming an operating system. But how does it work?

Alexis Rylko has already gone through it with an in-depth research, identifying that:

• ChatGPT Shopping Research is a 4-step shopping guide: Understanding the user’s intent, Reasoning (Chain of Thought), Querying external sources, Producing the final shopping guide
• The ChatGPT shopping assistant takes into account your personal characteristics: likes, dislikes, style, etc.
• ChatGPT Shopping queries Google Shopping: The product information is exactly the same as in Google Shopping: product names, images, average rating, number of reviews, price.
• And more!

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Read Alexis' ChatGPT Shopping Research analysis here: ChatGPT Shopping Powered by Google Shopping, & other Discoveries from under the Hood​

To help you save time and capture more business

​Google Post Launched Scheduling & Multi-Location Publishing in Google Business Profiles​
​Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable
​Google has officially launched scheduling and multi-location publishing for Google Posts in Google Business Profiles. This was a feature Google tested last month and is now fully live.

Gary also noted that “the change is hard to accept”

​Google: SEM and SEO will need to coevolve with search since SEO is not dead​
​Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land
​Gary Illyes posted his reaction to a Microsoft Bing article written by Fabrice Canel and Krishna Madhavan of Microsoft, about how AI Search is changing how conversions are measured: “I know for sure however is that SEM and SEO will need to coevolve with search, just like it has in the past 30 years”.

"Why would they want to see a page that no user sees?"

​Google’s Mueller Questions Need For LLM-Only Markdown Pages​
​Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal
​John Mueller pushes back on building LLM-only Markdown or JSON pages for LLMs, saying clean HTML and structured data should come first.

It's about the value that the site adds to the web

​Google: Rewriting AI Content With Human Content Won't Lead To Recovery​​
​John Mueller / Search Engine Roundtable
​John Mueller said that rewriting AI content by a human won't change the site's ranking in Google by default. Instead, he said, you need to rethink your whole content strategy and the purpose of the site.

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Stop guessing how AI sees your brand.
Start measuring it with Advanced Web Ranking.

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Get deep insights into how AI search platforms interpret and present your brand across different topics vs your competitors:

• Topic Associations: Learn what topics AI chatbots link to your brand and how those topics align with your business goals.
• Custom Topic Tracking: Monitor any topic relevant to your brand, from niche industry terms to user questions.
• AI-Recommended Domains: Find out which websites are mentioned next to yours in AI-generated responses.
• Competitive Intelligence: Don’t just track yourself, see how your competitors are performing across AI platforms and stay one step ahead.

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Create content worth "stealing"

​Navigating Content Marketing Amidst the Rise of AI — Whiteboard Friday​​
​Ross Simmonds / Moz
​Ross explains how search has changed and how we, as marketers, can navigate that change to produce quality content. With the increased use of AI and LLMs, content creation may seem more complex, but it’s still based on the fundamentals we use every day.

Redefining success metrics in a zero-click world

​Measuring zero-click search: Visibility-first SEO for AI results​​
​Curtis Weyant / Search Engine Land
​Prioritize influence over clicks. Learn how to measure visibility beyond traffic, by tracking brand presence, SERP features, AI-driven search results and more.

• Related: Rethinking Measurement: Smarter Data, Attribution, and AI by Gianluca Fiorelli and Arnout Hellemans​

From visitor quality to brand reputation

​Beyond SERP visibility: 7 success criteria for organic search in 2026​​
​Nikki Lam / Search Engine Land
​As search shifts into AI and multi-surface discovery, these seven signals show what real organic success looks like in 2026.

Quality > Quantity. Always.

​What happens when you delete over 50% of a website’s content?​​
​Stefan Mustieles
​This energy comparison site had over 1,000 outdated, off-topic, and low-value URLs, some dating back to 2015. After an in-depth content audit, they removed everything that didn’t align with their core proposition. The result? A huge increase in organic traffic

Nice SEO deals to check out

​Top SEO Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals in 2025​​
​SEOFOMO
​Make the most out of Black Friday + Cyber Monday to expand your SEO and AI Search resources and tools! Take a look at deals from AlsoAsked, Webflow, Sitebulb, InLinks, Waikay, Advanced Web Ranking, LLM Pulse, FandangoSEO and more!

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The Signal Viewer exposes seven distinct ranking signals

​Reverse-Engineering Google AI Mode: What Discovery Engine Reveals About Google’s AI Search Architecture​
​Metehan Yesilyurt
​Google's Discovery Engine won’t give you the exact weights Google uses in AI Mode. But it gives you something almost as valuable: a window into how Google engineers think about AI search. Metehan goes through what this means for AI search optimization.

Claim and maintain profiles on review platforms

​How to optimize for ChatGPT: LLMs.txt doesn’t matter but brand mentions on Quora and Reddit do​
​Yulia Deda / SE Ranking
​SE Ranking analyzed 129,000 unique domains and 216,524 pages across 20 niches to understand citation patterns in ChatGPT’s AI responses. Their results bust some common myths and show what really drives AI citations.

A Comprehensive Overview of AI Bots

​To block or not to block? Bot is the question​
​Dan Petrovic / DEJAN
​Many site owners block bots to protect their intellectual property, but in doing so, they might be turning away the “good” AI traffic, like search engines and assistants that drive real visitors your way. Dan breaks it down so you can decide wisely.

Visual search is a shopping behavior

​How to make products machine-readable for multimodal AI search​​
​Miriam Jessier / Search Engine Land
​Design ecommerce images that AI can accurately interpret, from OCR-ready labels to curated context and sentiment-aligned visuals.

LLM Monitoring (18 companies) split $227 million

​The Alpha is not LLM monitoring​
​Kevin Indig / Growth Memo
​73% of AI Visibility tracking companies were founded in 2024 and raised $12 million on average. Kevin analyzed AI search tracking funding data, the companies behind it and goes through how investors chased LLM monitoring because it looked like easy SaaS, but the durable value sits in Agentic SEO tools that actually ship work.

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Help understand how organic search (both AI and traditional) evolved in 2025, and identify the top trends for 2026 – from key challenges to shifts in strategies, goals, tools, and expectations – by taking the SEOFOMO 15 questions survey below for a chance to win an SEOFOMO hoodie and travel mug.

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The survey will remain open until December 20th, 2025, and the results and giveaway winner will be announced on December 22nd, 2025.

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• ​SEO/AEO Editorial Contractor (Contract Basis) at Webflow​
• ​SEO & Web Performance Specialist at Alliant International University​