The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

November 23, 2025
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Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by +40,400 SEOs.
Today's sponsor is SEOTesting.com. Want to advertise? Ask here.​

From Photoshop to... Semrush

​Adobe to Acquire Semrush​
Semrush​
​Adobe and Semrush announced that Adobe will acquire Semrush in an all-cash transaction for $12.00 per share, representing a total equity value of approximately $1.9 billion. Adobe and Semrush expect to deliver a comprehensive solution that gives marketers a holistic understanding of how their brands appear across owned channels, LLMs, traditional search, and the wider web.

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​I asked SEOs on LinkedIn about their expectations from this acquisition for Semrush users through a poll, and so far, 47% say they expect the impact to be negative for Semrush users, followed by 25% who are still unsure, 15% who believe it will be positive, and 13% who think nothing will change. What do you think? Take the the poll.

AI travel planning is here to test

​Google Extends AI Travel Planning And Agentic Booking In Search​
​Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal​
​Google has announced a series of new travel AI-powered features:

• Travel planning with Canvas is available on desktop in the U.S. for those opted into the AI Mode experiment in Labs.
• The global expansion of Flight Deals, Google's AI-powered search tool within Google Flights that recently launched in the U.S., Canada and India.

And more! Check them out.

Two less features remaining before they release AI filters?

Google releases custom annotations and a branded queries filter in Search Console​
​Daniel Waisberg, Tsahi Edri, Michael Huzman / Google​
​Google announced two new features within the Search Console performance reports:

• Custom annotations: You can right-click on your performance chart, select "Add annotation," and write down your note along with a specific date. These annotations appear directly on your chart, providing a clear visual reference point for your data.
• Branded queries filter: Google is rolling out a branded queries filter in the performance report for top-level properties, making it easier to separate branded and non-branded queries. There is also a new Insights card that shows the click breakdown for branded versus non-branded traffic.

AI Mode can now dynamically create the response layout on the fly

​Google Brings Gemini 3 To Search’s AI Mode​
Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal​
​Google has integrated Gemini 3 in Search’s AI Mode, shipping for the first time a Gemini model to Search on its release date. Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the U.S. can access Gemini 3 Pro by selecting “Thinking” from the model dropdown in AI Mode.

"Be skeptical of shortcuts"

​Google, Microsoft & Perplexity On GEO Rush
​Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

Business Insider interviewed both SEOs and representatives from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity on what it calls the "GEO rush." The rush for SEO companies or other companies to sell GEO (AI SEO) related services. There are quotes from Danny Sullivan from Google, Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft, and more.

Does AI Search Traffic Convert?

​How AI Search Is Changing the Way Conversions are Measured​
​Fabrice Canel, Krishna Madhavan / Microsoft
​Fabrice and Krishna go through how the path to conversion has changed with AI platforms, how AI search understands and responds to evolving intent and how we should now rethink success metrics accordingly.

John goes through the latest Google releases

​Search Console, AI, and HTTPs updates Search Console (Q4 ‘25) [Video]
​John Mueller / Google Search Central
​John goes through the top Google's search news from Q4: Search Console enhancements, including custom annotations, agentic features, creators in Discover, AI mode expansions, and more.

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Track and Test Your LLM Traffic

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LLMs are now real discovery channels.
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With SEOTesting, you can finally quantify them. The LLM Traffic Pages Report shows you which pages on your site attract visits from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot, and how that changes over time. Then use our new LLM Test Type to run proper time-based tests on content or technical tweaks and measure uplift in LLM visits per day.
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This is all valuable evidence that your stakeholders will trust!

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How to continue growing despite Google SERPs shifts?

​Navigating Algorithm Shifts & AI Overviews [Presentation]
​Aleyda Solis​
​How have Google updates and releases taken us here? What’s the impact on traffic to brands, retailers, and publications? What should we do to succeed in SEO from now on? Aleyda goes through this and more in this presentation.

Why AI makes cross-language authority critical

​Multilingual SEO: Building topical authority across languages​
​Dani Leitner / Oncrawl
​AI search engines ignore language barriers. Dani explains how to build topical authority across all your site languages so any version can represent your brand effectively.

Intended to demystify search engine’s operations

​Decoded: Google Quality Rater Guidelines – Content Quality​
​Shaun Anderson / Searchable
​Shaun goes through how Google's Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines map to leaked Content Warehouse attributes like contentEffort, OriginalContentScore, siteAuthority, and more.

AI Search Magnifies Your Technical SEO Debt

​The Technical SEO Debt That Will Destroy Your AI Visibility​​
​Reza Moaiandin / Search Engine Journal
​Reza explains how hidden technical SEO debt could quietly destroy your brand’s AI presence and how you can address this.

GEO is a stress test for SEO

​SEO’s future isn’t content. It’s governance​
​Daniel Cheung / Search Engine Land
​GEO is not about hacks. It’s about whether SEO leaders can drive ontology and consistency across the enterprise before someone else does. Daniel explains what enterprise SEO leaders should actually do.

• Related: ​Repositioning What SEO Success Looks Like by Dan Taylor​

Last SEO Black Friday Call

​Submit your SEO Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals 2025​
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How AI is transforming the web

​2O25 Generative AI Landscape: From Platforms to Pathways [Report]​​
​Similarweb
​Similarweb has published a report with real data on how Gen AI is reshaping discovery and decision-making, analyzing billions of data points to reveal the trends, shifts, and competitive signals:

• +76% YoY growth in Gen AI Avg Monthly Visits
• 319% YoY growth in Gen AI app downloads
• 7% CVR Of Gen AI referrals to transactional sites

You can use the Web Search API to verify if a page is cached/indexed

​OpenAI is quietly building and maintaining a cached index of webpages and search results​​
​Jérôme Salomon
​Jérôme shares how he found it in the Web Search Tool API documentation and means you can perform a ChatGPT Search request with the API and force the system to use the cached/indexed results instead of the grounding process that fetches search results from Google.

The most visible placements drive the fewest clicks

​Most ChatGPT links get 0% CTR – even highly visible ones​​
​Danny Goodwin / Search Engine Land
​Newly revealed data exposes how little traffic ChatGPT drives to publishers. Spoiler alert: The gap between visibility and clicks is huge.

Most ecommerce brands aren't prepared for agentic search

​Beyond the AI Hype: How SEOs Can Lead Through Change​
​Gianluca Fiorelli, Sophie Brannon / Advanced Web Ranking
​Sophie shares about StudioHawk’s clever methods for integrating AI into content creation, tactics to influence how LLMs talk about brands, when to set AI aside and let human expertise lead the way, and much more in this insightful interview with Gianluca.

AI Search Insights from the Latest SEOFOMO Meetup

​Expert Opinions on AEO from the SEOFOMO Event in London​​
​Ross Tavendale / Type A Media
​Ross attended the latest SEOFOMO x Similarweb Meetup and goes through the different views about AI search shared through the conference, from “You can’t measure LLMs – they are neural nets for goodness sake” to “Prompt tracking doesn’t work, you get a different answer for the same query”. Read more in this insightful event review.

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• ​SEO Strategist at Tinuiti​
• ​Manager, SEO at Figma​
• ​SEO Strategist at Socium​
• ​SEO Specialist II at Dealer.com​
• ​Head of SEO at 12100 Collective​
• ​SEO Specialist at Red Door Interactive ​
• ​Principal AI (Search) Engineer at Yieldmo​
• ​SEO/GEO Strategist (Contract) at Simplistic​