The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

Nov 15, 2026
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Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by +46.4K SEOs.
Today's sponsor is Semrush and Ahrefs. Ask to advertise here.​

Another core update is here...

​Google November 2026 Core Update Is Rolling Out​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

Google began rolling out its November 2026 core update on November 10, with completion expected within two weeks. Remember you can use the SEOFOMO's Latest Rankings Shifts Dashboard to easily track changes.

Better query fan-out and more links? Let’s see what changes for our sites

​Google Search gets a major upgrade with Gemini 4 Hydrogen​

Robby Stein / Google

Google has called it the biggest model upgrade to search yet, to be used in AI Mode and for the harder questions in AIO's: Better understanding of intent, improved query fan-out and linking, richer language understanding. Let’s see how this impacts our sites and brand visibility, recommendations and traffic.

• Related: Important increase of cited pages across top domains in AI Overviews since Nov 9-10, just a couple of days before the Gemini 4 Hydrogen release.​

We expected Search Console, we got a basic biz profile & merchant center

​OpenAI Introduced Businesses in ChatGPT - Here's a first look [Video]​

Aleyda Solis

OpenAI finally released a way for brands to get first-party insights about their AI mentions and traffic in ChatGPT. I registered my own company to try ... and my verdict so far? At this point, they get more insights from us, than us from them! Watch now.

• Related: Introducing Businesses in ChatGPT by OpenAI​

Yahoo lets users switch between traditional results and AI answers

​Yahoo Launches Pivot Search, Yahoo Scout App & More​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

Yahoo has introduced Pivot Search, bringing traditional search results and Scout’s AI answers into the same experience. Scout is also leaving beta, adding optional memories for personalization, and launching mobile apps with voice conversations and photo inputs.

Another setback for Google...

​Google Loses Another Round in Legal Battle Against SerpApi Over Scraping​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

Google has lost again in SerpApi's scraping legal fight in court, with the court giving Google 21 days to amend its complaint. "The judge ruled in favor of SerpApi on its motion to dismiss Google's amended complaint. Importantly, the judge did not rule that SerpApi's scraping practices are lawful."

• Related: Why Google is taking aggressive action on SERP data collection, and what to do about it by Ray Grieselhuber​

Who owns AI visibility for holiday shopping topics?

Semrush’s Peak Season Positioning study has dropped, exploring the brands showing up in AI responses when shoppers ask about holiday deals and gifts. The analysis of 269 topics across Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas finds out:

• Where specialists rise above the biggest names
• Which brand leads in mentions without a single citation
• How ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Mode build different shortlists for the same queries

Before finishing with your visibility checklist for final preparations ahead of shopping season.

More internet users, fewer website visits...

​New Research: Traffic to the Open Web Has Fallen 12% in 5 years; Visits/web User Are Down 30%​

Rand Fishkin / SparkToro

Rand analyzes Similarweb data showing declining browser visits to the world’s top million websites despite growth in internet users: "there’s 25% more people using the web, and a decline in total traffic. Which means… visits/visitor have dropped steadily in the last 5 years, and total visits to the web’s top million sites have fallen ~10% too."

A practical reference for aligning developers, SEOs, and content teams

​SEO And GEO Website Build Standard 2027​

Marketing Signals, Jono Alderson, Mark Williams-Cook / Marketing Signals

A website build specification and free checklist for new sites, redesigns, migrations, and major template changes; specifying core and conditional requirements, and experimental AI search enhancements.

Your product images communicate more than you might think

​What Google sees in an image​

Olivier de Segonzac / RESONEO

To Google, a photo is first and foremost a list of labels: words its vision models attach to the image, each with a confidence score from 0 to 1. The first ones are Knowledge Graph entities, with their ID, the MID: a shoe, snow, winter. Learn about them and more in this insightful analysis by Olivier.

You can publish dozens of articles a day... but why would you need to?

​About: “Content systems creating xx articles per day” wait .. WHY?​

Aleyda Solis

Unless you’re publishing news, why make daily article volume the goal? I explain why expert guidance should start with real audience needs, first-hand experience, and differentiated value. Scaling content can make sense for inventory-driven sites, but producing more articles doesn’t automatically create more reasons for people to choose your brand.

• Related: Good Vs. Bad pSEO: Learnings From A Decade Of Building Scalable Content Engines by Nitin Manchanda​

Choose the right SEO split testing method for your site

​SEO Split Testing In 2027: How To Prove A Change Actually Worked​

Sophie Brannon / Search Engine Journal

Sophie explains how to assess SEO changes with comparable control pages, predefined success criteria, and a clear connection to business outcomes. Learn how to choose a testing method that fits your site, account for uncertainty, and more.

Moving beyond keyword still needs knowing what customers search for

​“F- keywords.” Well, what are you replacing them with?​

Chris Green

Chris challenges the idea that moving beyond individual keyword rankings means abandoning keywords altogether. He explains how representative queries help map audience needs to pages, preserve content decisions, and monitor visibility.

Get talked about where ChatGPT reads

​Where Does ChatGPT Get Its Information? 4 Sources, Explained​

Si Quan Ong / Ahrefs

Si Quan breaks down four sources that inform ChatGPT’s responses: training data, live web search, licensed publisher content, and user-provided context. He explains their different roles and what they mean for brands assessing opportunities to appear in answers, beyond treating every response as a search result.

To block or not to block is no longer the only question

​Bot management in 2026​

Chris Green

Chris explains why bot policies need to distinguish search crawlers, AI training bots, retrieval bots, and user-initiated agents. He also highlights how CDN and firewall rules can contradict robots.txt, and why SEO, engineering, security, and commercial teams need to coordinate decisions about automated access.

Some purchase needs never make it into your keyword research

​Why Agentic Commerce is Hard to Keyword​

Eric Cheung / sayeric.com

Eric analyzes purchase needs that shoppers struggle to express through conventional product searches, from highly personal gifts to purchases with unusual constraints. His “hard-to-keyword” concept offers a useful perspective for ecommerce SEOs: recorded queries don’t necessarily capture everything customers need help finding.

France’s AIO's rollout shows why clicks & rankings need separate analysis

​The Impact of Google AI Overviews rolling out in France – The clearest evidence of impact to clicks and click-through rate yet [GSC Data]​

Glenn Gabe

Glenn shares Search Console examples showing changes in clicks and CTR around the July 22 rollout of Google’s AI search features in France. Several sites experienced declines, but others didn't.

AI research complements Google

​How software buyers use AI​

Kevin Indig

Kevin analyzes a Wynter survey of 200 participants about their use of AI when evaluating software. Among respondents with vendors already in mind, 63% reported adding another through AI; 62% of those who chose a vendor said it appeared in the first answer. Learn about these and more insights in this study.

The only 3 ways people discover your business

Platforms come and go. Algorithms change. AI is rewriting marketing. But there are still only three ways people discover a business: search, attention, and word of mouth.
​
In DISCOVERABLE, Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo distills 15 years of marketing, and the principles that grew Ahrefs from bootstrapped startup to $150M ARR without big funding rounds, into a practical playbook for making all three work for you.
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"Ahrefs runs one of the most impressive marketing operations in software." — Nathan Barry, founder & CEO of Kit.

Out November 24.

• ​Sr SEO Specialist at Amsive​
• ​SEO Product Manager at Zillow​
• ​Senior Technical SEO at Organic Hackers​
• ​SEO Specialist – Fully Remote | Upto $100/hr at Mercor​
• ​Director, Digital PR at Wpromote​
• ​B2B Content Marketing Lead at Square​
• ​Senior Technical SEO – Freelance at Organic Hackers​
• ​Senior Director, Head of Growth Marketing at HubSpot​
• ​SEO & Content Marketing Specialist at New York University​