The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

Nov 8, 2026
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Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by +46.4K SEOs.
Today's sponsor is AirOps. Ask to advertise here.​

Now we can monitor if AI agents can actually get things done on our sites

​Agents act, LLMs recommend, and people browse. Microsoft Clarity connects all three journeys.​

Nabil Naghdy / Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity introduces Agentic Analytics to monitor supported AI agents and simulate whether they can complete key tasks, starting with commerce and travel scenarios. The update also includes Brand Agents and Ask Clarity, which answers questions about site usage with supporting session evidence.

One AI training preference across providers? Google plans support for 2027

​Google: Supporting a shared AI training control for websites​

John Mueller / Google

Google plans to support a shared robots.txt control that lets websites specify AI training preferences across participating providers. Based on work from the IETF’s AIPREF group, the proposal would coexist with provider-specific controls such as Google-Extended, with Google starting support in 2027.

• Related: Your content, your choice: clearer preferences for training and grounding by Krishna Madhavan ​

Canadian based Google users will be able to buy directly in AI Mode

​Google Brings UCP Direct Checkout To AI Mode In Canada​

Brooke Osmundson / Search Engine Journal

Google is expanding UCP powered checkout to AI Mode and the Gemini app in Canada, initially with lululemon, select Shopify merchants, Shoppers Drug Mart, and Simons. Shoppers can complete eligible purchases using Google Pay, with a simplified UCP integration through Merchant Center planned for next year.

• Related: Google AI Overviews For Brands Moved To Right Column by Barry Schwartz​

A ChatGPT Search Console dashboard coming soon? Yes, please!

​OpenAI Working On ChatGPT Tools For Business For Analytics & Citations​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

OpenAI appears to be developing tools for businesses to claim their presence in ChatGPT, update business and product information, and track mentions and website clicks.

• Related: Google’s Search Volume Is About 5x ChatGPT’s, OpenAI Says by Matt G. Southern​

Your PageSpeed score improved, but did your site actually get faster?

​Google Lighthouse Update Changes How PageSpeed Insights Simulates Loading​

Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal

An update to Lighthouse’s loading simulation can change PageSpeed Insights scores without any changes to your site, with JavaScript-heavy pages more likely to be affected. Check the Lighthouse version and real user performance data before attributing a higher lab score to your optimization work.

An important URL may stay indexed through an error... temporarily

​Google Can Temporarily Protect Important URLs From Being Deindexed​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

Gary Illyes explained that Google temporarily kept VLC’s URL indexed despite it returning a 418 error, because of the page’s importance. This provides context for why a highly important URL might remain in search despite issues, but it’s no reason to delay fixing unexpected 4xx responses.

Inside AI Search Measurement Webinar

Every channel brand fund has a unit of measurement. AI search doesn’t. Visibility scores show where a brand appears, not how much exposure it received, so AI search stays stuck as a test program.

On November 20 at 2 PM ET, AirOps hosts From black box to budget: inside AI search measurement. Matt Hammel, Pranav Piyush (Paramark), and Hitesh Wadhwani (creator of Google Meridian) cover how a standard exposure metric could work, why a recommendation counts for more than a mention, and how to feed AI search into marketing mix models.

Learn about what influences the product shopping journey

​Google Shopping, from the SERP to AI Mode: what a product must prove to be shown, then bought​

Olivier de Segonzac / RESONEO

Olivier analyzes product characteristics from the Google’s Shopping catalog through search results, AI recommendations, to the checkout. He shares about product and offer information, pricing, availability, reviews, and merchant details, connecting the stages ecommerce SEOs need to assess beyond the product page.

Fewer homepage clicks don’t tell the whole brand story

​3 in 4 homepages lost organic clicks: An analysis of 110 sites​

Jenny Lee Lynch / Search Engine Land

Jenny’s analysis of 110 homepages across six industries found that 74% lost organic clicks between Q3 2025 and Q3 2026. She explains why homepage traffic alone is an incomplete measure of brand performance, and why deeper landing pages and changing search behavior deserve a closer look.

• Related: What channels grow when organic search shrinks? by Kevin Indig​

Incomplete analytics? Make the limits clear in your SEO reporting

​How To Report SEO Performance When Analytics Data Is Incomplete​

Dii Pooler / Moz

Dii tackles how to report SEO performance when your analytics data is incomplete, a relevant challenge in SEO when communicating results and supporting decisions with an imperfect view of performance.

Stop needing a developer ticket for every basic SEO implementation

​Your CMS Is Still Failing SEO Basics – 11 Fixes To Demand​

Sally Mills / Search Engine Journal

Sally shares 11 capabilities that every CMS should offer, including semantic HTML, server-rendered content, sitemap controls, editable robots.txt, and canonical management, among others. A practical reference for assessing platform limitations and making the case for changes that reduce recurring SEO implementation bottlenecks.

AI search optimization has a prioritization problem. Limor is here to fix that.

​How to Build an AI Search Optimization Roadmap​

Limor Barenholtz / Similarweb

Limor shares a five-step process in a comprehensive guide to baseline AI presence, diagnose gaps, assess the evidence behind proposed actions, and organize implementation into 30-day blocks.

Technical SEO’s scope is growing. Here’s how to tackle the challenges

​Tech SEO in the AI Search Era: The Shifts, Trends and What to Do About Them [Presentation]​

Aleyda Solis

Check out my TechSEO Connect presentation on how AI search, automation, and agents are changing technical SEO: Using findings from the SEOFOMO Tech SEO in an AI search era survey, I share practical actions to reduce execution bottlenecks, secure stakeholder support, and measure impact while keeping expert judgment central to the work.

Google AI citations are significantly more important than we thought

​We Opted Out of Google AI Search - Here's What Happened​

Cyrus Shepard / Zyppy Signal

What happens when you opt out of Google’s AI answers? Cyrus shares a 28-day opt-out experiment in which his site’s Google AI visibility disappeared and returned after opting back in. Comparing the periods, he estimates an AI search CTR of around 0.9%.

We cannot engineer authority entirely inside our website

​Authority Beyond Your Website: Why Brand Amplification Is Essential for AI Search​

Gianluca Fiorelli / Advanced Web Ranking

Gianluca explains how digital PR and independent coverage can reinforce associations between a brand, its experts, and relevant topics. He makes the case for assessing what third-party sources say about your expertise alongside the links they provide, without inventing a universal AI “brand authority” score.

Before buying another AI visibility platform...

​Why Your Org Isn’t Ready for a Platform-Only Approach to AI Search​

Mike King / iPullRank

Mike explains that AI search software needs to be matched with the expertise and capacity to identify gaps, prioritize changes, and get them implemented. A useful framework for evaluating a platform, agency, or combined approach based on how the work will actually happen inside your organization.

• ​AEO/SEO Lead at Profound​
• ​SEO Product Manager at Zillow​
• ​SEO Account Manager at Webserv​
• ​SEO Specialist at Liberty Marketing​
• ​AEO and GEO Marketing Manager at Stripe​
• ​Senior SEO, ASO and AI Search Specialist at Smart, Savvy + Associates​
• ​Account Strategist, Content & SEO Strategist (Remote US) at Directive​