The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

April 5th, 2026
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Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by +44K SEOs.
Today's sponsor is Profound. Ask to advertise here.​

Visibility moved away from intermediary players

​Google completed the rollout of the March 2026 Core Update: Here are the Top Visibility Shifts & Patterns In the US​

Aleyda Solis

I’ve analyzed the biggest US domain level visibility shifts in Sistrix, along with the top keyword changes behind them, using a two-week measurement window from March 26 to April 11, 2026, which includes the rollout period of the March 2026 core update from March 27 to April 8.

One of the clearest early patterns was a shift away from many intermediary, aggregator, directory, and quick-answer utility sites, and toward a smaller set of stronger destination brands, institutional sources, specialist sites, and dominant platforms.

You still need to complete the booking via Google partners though

​Google expands agentic restaurant booking in AI Mode globally​

Google

Google announced that they’re expanding AI Mode’s agentic restaurant-booking capability to 8 new locations: Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and the United Kingdom: “Tell AI Mode your group size, time, and vibe; it scans multiple platforms simultaneously to find real-time, bookable spots”.

Welcome back, Data Studio

​Google Reintroduces Looker Studio as Data Studio​

Sean Zinsmeister, Jennifer Skene / Google

Google has rebranded Looker Studio to Data Studio (again): The new Data Studio experience is available in two editions- Data Studio, the free version, and Data Studio Pro, “designed for scaling teams”.

Time to check and add the relevant annotations if you see the same

​The fake Google Search Console impressions have started to come crashing down​

Brodie Clark

Brodie is seeing a clear decline within Image Search for the moment (the original surface he was alerted by), with other surfaces still to follow.

"Search would be an agent manager in which you're doing a lot of things"

​“Jarvis Approaching”: Google's Sundar Pichai Signals an Agentic, Multi-Threaded Future for Search​

Glenn Gabe / Search Engine Roundtable

Sundar Pichai was on the Cheeky Pint podcast and was asked about the future of Search. He basically laid out a future where Search is Jarvis-like, where users will be completing tasks and have "many threads running".

Crawl depth per domain didn't change

​ChatGPT Search Is Citing Fewer Sites, Data Shows​

Matt G. Southern, RESONEO

An analysis of ChatGPT responses shows average unique domains per response dropped after the transition to GPT-5.3 Instant: "Average unique domains per response dropped from 19 before the transition to 15 after. Average unique URLs per response fell from 24 to 19."

Profound Sheets: Marketing Agents At Scale

Sheets is the new connective layer for your marketing program. Profound data flows in, Agents do the work, and content flows out to your CMS. Here's what you can build:
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• Weekly AEO health reports
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• Localization at scale, and much more

"Offering a Product or Service" has the strongest correlation

​5 Data-Backed Features of Websites Winning Google in 2026​

Cyrus Shepard / Zyppy Signal

Cyrus identified 5 features that very strongly predicted whether a site was winning or losing Google over the past 12 months. These features include: offering a product or service, allowing task completion, proprietary assets, and more.

A view of the current state of SEO

​SEO in 2026: Higher standards, AI influence, and a web still catching up​

Chris Green / Search Engine Land

Technical SEO is getting easier by default, but decisions around bots, LLMs.txt, and structured data are becoming more complex. Chris goes through it all in this comprehensive analysis based on the Web Almanac SEO chapter data.

What ecommerce brands get wrong with product deed optimization

​Why Product Feeds Shouldn’t Be The Most Ignored SEO System In Ecommerce​

Sophie Brannon / Search Engine Journal

Product feeds are evolving into core search infrastructure, shaping how ecommerce brands appear across organic, shopping, and AI-driven discovery. Sophie explains what product feed optimization actually looks like.

Determines whether a web page is a shopping page or not

​Chrome’s New Shopping Classifier​

Dan Petrovic, Olivier de Segonzac / Dejan

Dan and Olivier analyzed Google’s shopping classifier model, reverse-engineered its inference pipeline, and shared in this analysis the implications for Ecommerce SEO: "If Chrome can’t identify your page as a shopping page from the first ~450 words of visible content, your users won’t see commerce features like price tracking and shopping insights."

Balancing AI hype with real data

​Beyond the Fix: Technical SEO as a Creative Strategy​

Gianluca Fiorelli, Will Kennard / Advanced Web Ranking

Will goes through Next.js, technical SEO for AI, and GEO strategies, sharing insights on how to balance modern JS frameworks with search visibility.

95% of the cited pages blocked GPTBot or Google-Extended

​Do News Publishers That Block AI Crawlers Get Cited Less Often by AI?​

Vince Nero / BuzzStream

Vince analyzed 4 million citations from 3,600 prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, and AI Mode, across 10 industries, to see if blocking crawlers prevents citations. He found that around 75% of sites blocking OpenAI or Google AI bots still appeared in AI citations.

The way we phrase our questions impact how an LLM surfaces brands

​Brand Bias in Prompts: An Experiment​

Dr. Peter J. Meyers / Moz

Dr. Peter tested 300 prompts to measure how common brand mentions are in LLM responses. Every prompt that included a brand returned one or more brand mentions in the output. For non-brand, this dropped by almost half (53%), with soft-brand prompts somewhere in the middle.

Raise the triggering threshold for AI Overviews

​Google’s Response to the NYT AI Overviews Article Doesn’t Tell the Full Story​

Lily Ray / Algorythmic

Lily shares a closer look at Google's response to the NYT AI Overviews accuracy story: what the 91% figure is missing, why the 'long-tail' defense doesn't hold up, and what she believes Google should do differently.

The problem: our brand narrative is being written without us

​Transmedia Storytelling in the Age of AI Search: Building Worlds For and With Machines​

Gianluca Fiorelli

Gianluca shares Henry Jenkin’s seven principles and why they are essential for AI Search SEO to maintain control of your narrative.

How the comparison search phase has collapsed

​How consumers navigate high-stakes purchases in AI Mode​

Kevin Indig

A new user behavior study by Kevin shows how AI Mode users accept shortlists built by the LLM, while classic Google search users build them themselves. He found that the AI’s top pick becomes the user’s top pick 74% of the time.

ChatGPT’s total traffic has plateaued

​ChatGPT traffic analysis: Insights from 17 months of clickstream data​

Luke Harsel / Semrush

Luke dug into 17 months of clickstream data to map how ChatGPT usage is changing, how referral traffic is growing, and where that traffic goes. “Over 30% of all referral traffic from ChatGPT goes to 10 domains. And over 20% goes to Google”.

• ​SEO Team Lead at Leadtech​
• ​Content marketing lead at Canonical​
• ​SEO Manager (Contract) at Mixbook​
• ​SEO Consultant at Chartis Interactive​
• ​SEO Outreach Specialist at Marketeering Group​
• ​Senior SEO Specialist at University of Rochester​
• ​Senior Manager, Growth Marketing (SEO/AEO/ABM) at Ushur​
• ​Content Marketing Manager at PayNearMe, Inc.​

Introducing SERP Lens: The Web Browser Built For SEO Pros

The SEO industry now has its own dedicated browser.

Built and managed by well-known SEO experts Brodie Clark and Sam Underwood, SERP Lens is now available to the community on macOS to help elevate your visibility in Search and LLMs.

Website analysis. Location emulation. AI search insights. Rank tracking. SERP features. Annotation. Agentic insights (coming soon). One browser. And more to come in the near future.

Make use of the 7-day free trial now by selecting the ‘Lite’ plan (no credit card details required).​
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SEOFOMO x WhitePress Free Meetup in Boston

Join the next free SEOFOMO Meetup with WhitePress in Boston featuring SEO trends and AI Search panels, quizzes, giveaways, free drinks, food, and networking on June 2nd, 2026 from 6pm to 9pm.

Learn and network with experienced SEO and AI Search specialists, including Dawn Anderson, Carolyn Shelby, Mordy Oberstein, Jordan Koene, Navah Hopkins, Martha van Berkel, Victor Pan, Celeste Gonzalez, George Nguyen, Dale Bertrand and many more!