The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

October 5th, 2025
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Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by +39.3K SEOs.
Today's sponsor is Clearscope. Want to advertise? Ask here.​

ChatGPT has now become an ecommerce platform

​OpenAI announces Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol​
​OpenAI
​OpenAI has announced the release of Instant Checkout, powered by their new Agentic Commerce Protocol. U.S. ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Free users can now buy directly from U.S. Etsy sellers right in chat, with over a million Shopify merchants coming soon.

• Merchants who want to enable Instant Checkout should implement the Agentic Commerce Protocol and provide OpenAI with a product feed through the Product Feed Spec.
• Along with this release, a new version of "Shopping with ChatGPT Search" Doc was published. This is what has changed.​

Want to start optimizing for it? Check out these two guides by Andrea and Dan to help you do it:

• ​OpenAI Product Feeds: From Catalogs to Conversations by Andrea Volpini​
• ​Optimising for Agentic Commerce Protocol – A Technical Guide for SEOs by Dan Taylor​

A next step to a more visual experience

​Google AI Mode With More Visual Responses & Visual Fan-Out Technique​
​Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable
​Google announced that AI Mode had been updated to handle and respond more visually. So AI Mode responses both understand your queries in a more visual way and respond with more visual responses. Google said the responses aim at sparking inspiration, amongst other things.

It's live for free listing management in Bing Search

​Microsoft Launches New Bing Places For Business​​
​Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal
​Microsoft launched a new Bing Places with a recommendation tool, faster Google Business Page import, and automatic migration for existing users.

Take this into account when reusing expired domains

​Google Explains Expired Domains And Ranking Issues​
​Roger Montti / Search Engine Journal
​John Mueller answered a question about an expired domain that was unable to rank for relevant search queries, including its own brand name:

"Sometimes it just takes a lot of time for the old state of a domain to be shaken off (sometimes that’s also the case when it was parked for a while), and the site to be treated like something new / independent.”

You might be noticing some Google issues...

​Google Confirms Google Search Serving Issue​​
​Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable
​Google has confirmed a Google Search serving issue that is currently ongoing and impacting serving "some pages in some locales." They are now working on a fix.

In case you're a small biz that needs to access them

​Google Launches New Small-Business Resource Hub​​
​Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal
​This new hub centralizes links to Google's business tools, including Business Profile, Merchant Center, Google Ads, YouTube Ads, and Analytics.

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How can you cut through the noise?

​SEO for Growth Case Study: Revolutionizing a Saturated Market​​
​Gabriela Jennifer Troxler
​Breaking into a saturated market is increasingly difficult. Gabi explains how finding your unique angle is fundamental and why GOAT content is the only content worth pursuing.

A comprehensive guide to brand mentions auditing

​How to Audit Brand Mentions for Modern SEO​​
​Despina Gavoyannis
​Auditing your brand’s mentions is how you uncover how the public sees your brand, what misinformation might be feeding AI systems, and which topics and entities are most strongly connected to you. Despina goes through it.

Identify topics opportunities

​How To Create A Keyword Universe With Ahrefs + Claude​
​Chris Long / Nectiv Digital
​Chris explains how to create a sample keyword universe with Ahrefs and Claude by combining data from a bunch of different sources (query data, sales calls PAAs etc), to get a more comprehensive view of how people search and the different topical areas worth exploring.

A must watch to develop your topical authority

​Mastering Topical Authority in a Multi-Platform Search World​
​Andy Chadwick, Gianluca Fiorelli / Advanced Web Ranking
​Andy shares about the mistake of cutting top-of-funnel content, topical authority, how it’s built, why keywords are not dead, and much more in this insightful interview with Gianluca.

Like bad fashion trends, some tactics end up coming back

​Panda/Penguin were so 2000, Bruh. Long live LLM PBNs​
​Nick LeRoy
​Citations and brand mentions clearly influence how LLMs answer specific queries. Nick goes through a few ways you can legitimately earn those signals.

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We don’t have years to prepare for mass AI search adoption

​What OpenAI’s Research Reveals About The Future Of AI Search​
​Reza Moaiandin​
​Reza highlights how two key findings leap out: That we’re closer to mass adoption of AI than most probably realize and how users interact with ChatGPT has fundamentally shifted in the past year. Learn more about these in this analysis.

A 69% relative increase in overlap over 16 months

​AI Overviews Citations are Now 54% from Organic Rankings​
​BrightEdge​
​BrightEdge conducted a 16-month study across nine industries to analyze citation source patterns, overlap progression over time, and more. “AI Overview citations increasingly come from pages that rank organically, overlap grew from 32.3% to 54.5%”.

Backlink-earned authority helps, but it’s not everything

​How AI Really Weighs Your Links (Analysis of 35,000 datapoints)​
​Kevin Indig / Growth Memo
​Kevin analyzed 1,000 domains and their AI mentions against core backlink metrics to understand if backlinks still earn visibility in AI-based modalities of search, finding that: Link quality outweighs volume and nofollow links pull real weight; among other key insights.

AI Search Visibility and Impact on Ecommerce Traffic

​AI Indexing Benchmark Report: Ecommerce​
​Prerender
​Prerender analyzed product-focused queries across fashion, beauty, electronics, and home; identifying that only around 20% of AI-cited pages overlap with Google’s top 10 organic results; for fashion and beauty AI favors visuals, reviews, Q&A, and trend-driven content; and much more.

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• ​Technical SEO Manager at Growth Plays​
• ​SEO/GEO Account Manager at AthenaHQ​
• ​Director of SEO at OuterBox​
• ​Digital Content Executive at Product Marketing Alliance ​
• ​Senior SEO Specialist at Notta ​
• ​SEO Manager at Grammarly ​
• ​SEO Content Marketing at ElevenLabs​
• ​Search Engine Optimization Specialist at Infosys​