The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

August 24, 2025
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Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by 38.8K SEOs.
Today's sponsor: Profound. Want to advertise? Ask here.​

Agentic capabilities? For a cost. AI Mode globally? Not in the EU.

​Google announces the Test of new agentic features in AI Mode (for a cost) and AI Mode expansion globally across 180 new countries (but not the EU yet)​​
​Robby Stein / Google Blog​
​Google expands AI Mode to over 180 new countries and territories in English: However not yet EU countries like Spain, Germany, Italy, France... I guess there are always higher restrictions and policies they need to ensure compliance in the EU.

Google has also announced the test of new agentic capabilities in AI Mode, to find restaurant reservations, expanding soon to local service appointments and event tickets. However, this won't be available for everybody! This new agentic experience is rolling out for Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US through the “Agentic capabilities in AI Mode” experiment in Labs.

Google AI Ultra subscription costs USD 124.99/mo... I guess agentic features are way too resource intensive to give for free... let's see if this changes in the future, but if it stays this way, it will be definitely a factor for its adoption and impact.

I told you so...

​ChatGPT is using Google Search to answer your questions, here’s what we know
​Amanda Caswell / Tom’s Guide​
​The Information has investigated how OpenAI has been using data from Google Search via SerpApi, a web-scraping service, helping ChatGPT to answer real-time queries about news, sports, and financial markets; all areas where OpenAI's in-house tools are still playing catch-up.

This is not surprising at all: I had tested it, as well as Alexis Rylko here. Now we know how ChatGPT gets the data.

Check your sites access to AI crawlers asap

​Some hosting platforms are blocking AI crawlers by default without alerting website owners​​
​Yours Truly
​Beware that some hosting platforms are blocking AI crawlers by default without alerting website owners. I detected this was happening with the hosting of a couple of my sites after validating that there were server connection refusal errors to AI bots.

While I can understand these reasons, especially if the business model of the sites rely on content access, is also critical that hosting providers are clear about this to their customers rather than blocking by default without alerting and allowing customers to easily opt-out and/or configure which AI crawlers to allow.

If you haven't recently checked if AI crawlers are able to crawl or not your site pages, go and check asap. It's also fundamental to start monitoring your server log files closely.

You can use free AI bots crawl checkers for a quick validation, like this one here.​

• Related: The business risk of being invisible in answer engines by Becky Simms​

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It's almost here...

​Google To Begin Approving The First Google Trends API Applications​
​Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable
​Google announced the Google Trends API a month ago, saying SEOs should not expect to be part of the first group of applicants accepted. Now, they're saying they will begin going through those applications and onboarding a very small number of approved applicants around mid-September.

They measure performance differently

​Google: Why CrUX & Search Console Don’t Match On Core Web Vitals​
​Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal
​Barry Pollard from Google explains why CrUX and the Google Search Console often report different Core Web Vitals results. The short answer: Most CrUX data is measured by "page views". Search Console works differently. It evaluates individual URLs and groups similar pages.

When and what to lazy load

​Lazy loading & SEO demystified​
​John Mueller, Martin Splitt / Search Off The Record​
​John Mueller and Martin Splitt discuss how lazy loading affects indexing, ranking, and Core Web Vitals, sharing advice to improve site's speed and user experience.

Not always followed by some AI platforms

​Google On Good Web Crawler Attributes​
​Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable
​Myriam Jessier asked what are good attributes of a web crawler and Martin Splitt from Google, replied: declare identity in the user agent, respect robots.txt, backoff if the server slows, follow caching directives, among others. If only all crawlers -especially the new LLM ones- followed these.

A must-read for publishers

​The Future of SEO for News Publishers in 2025: Crafting the Perfect Recipe for the Best Summer Ice Cream​​
​Clara Soteras
​Clara shares how publishers evergreen organic search traffic is melting since the launch of AI Overviews, and the steps to avoid it: From becoming a reference point, to working on engagement and community building, and much more.

AIOs are impacting commercial queries too

​AI Overviews Impact: The Smoking Gun Data
​Journey Further
​A comprehensive analysis of CTR trends across query types, word lengths, and brand classifications by Journey Further during the AI Overviews rollout shows both informational and commercial queries had a substantial CTR decline, contradicting the hypothesis that AI Overviews primarily affect informational searches.

Be careful when changing your menu

​The Secret Migration: How Site Navigation Changes Can Destroy SEO Without You Realising​
​Dena Warren / Sitebulb​
​Dena explains how even small tweaks to your site’s navigation can break internal linking, tank crawlability, and ruin your rankings, without triggering an obvious red flag.

Webfonts are not decoration

​You’re loading fonts wrong (and it’s crippling your performance)​
​Jono Alderson​
​Jono goes through why if you’ve never tested your fonts under a cold-cache, slow-network condition, you don’t know how your site actually behaves. He also shares the most comprehensive guide to troubleshoot and start using fonts without hurting your site performance.
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Create AI-optimized content in minutes, not weeks

Using the largest dataset on AI visibility in the world, Profound helps brands great highly researched, accurate, and pre-optimized content that LLMs love. Generate content that matches your brand voice, product information and guidelines without manual oversight

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It's time to provide direct answers

​ChatGPT referral traffic is down -52% since July 21st​​
​Josh Blyskal​
​Josh analyzed ChatGPT citations and referral traffic and identified that ChatGPT is shifting towards sites that provide 'answers', and the long tail of citations is shrinking as a result: "Reddit and Wikipedia aren't winning because they're special. They're winning by default because they're the only ones providing direct answers." What to do? Josh provides actionable advice.

No need to chunk-obsess

​SEO “Chunk Optimization” is Overrated​
​Despina Gavoyannis / Ahrefs​
​“Chunk optimization” is the latest shiny object in SEO, but it’s not the shortcut to visibility in AI search that many think it is. Despina goes through it.

It's time to earn brand mentions

​How to leverage third-party sites in AI search
​Malte Landwehr / Peec AI ​
​Malte explains how if your competitor shows up in AI answers and you don’t, it’s likely because the LLMs are sourcing from content where they’re featured - and you’re not. He explains how to close that gap in this actionable guide.

Freshness is key for ChatGPT

​Inside ChatGPT’s GPT 5 Search: What the Configuration Files Reveal About How It Ranks Your Content​​
​Metehan Yesilyurt​
​Metehan has confirmed that ChatGPT doesn’t just grab the first search results it finds. Instead, it retrieves a larger set of potential sources and then applies a reranker to identify the most relevant and authoritative content, prioritizing recent content over older material.

How to really adapt your content

​5 ways to adapt your content strategy for LLMs​​
​Kevin Indig / Wix​
​Kevin goes through a few ways to adapt your content strategy for LLMs, from abandoning easy answers, adding something new to the conversation, allowing users to solve tasks onsite and more.

• Related: How to Optimize Content for Generative AI Search Engines in 10 Steps​ by ​Marta Szmidt ​

Revamp your affiliate marketing efforts

​Affiliate Marketing in the AI Era: New Tactics, Old Fundamentals with Gareth Hoyle & Rishi Lakhani ​
​Gianluca Fiorelli, Gareth Hoyle, Rishi Lakhani​
​Are you an affiliate marketer? Then this is a must watch: Gareth Hoyle and Rishi Lakhani discuss with Gianluca Fiorelli about affiliate marketing in the AI search era and share tips on LLM visibility, traffic beyond Google, and link strategies.

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• ​External Communications Manager, Search at Google​
• ​SEO Content Manager Contractor at Turo ​
• ​PT or FT SEO Content Associate at Growth Marketing Pro​
• ​Director of SEO at DoFollow ​
• ​Technical Project Manager, SEO at Pharma Media​
• ​Director, Performance Marketing & SEO at ezCater​
• ​Technical SEO (with dev experience) at iPullRank​
• ​SEO Specialist at Amplifyed​

​The SEOFOMO x Digital Olympus Raffle Free Digital Olympus Event Ticket Winner​
​SEOFOMO, Digital Olympus
​Congratulations to Clara Soteras, who has won the SEOFOMO x Digital Olympus Raffle thanks to her post on LinkedIn. I’ll be getting in touch to arrange the access to the free Digital Olympus Ticket.

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PS: If you haven't yet bought your ticket to Digital Olympus, you can still do it here. See you there!