The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

February 8, 2026
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Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by +41,000 SEOs.
Today's sponsor is Profound & Ahrefs. Want to advertise? Ask here.​

The first Core Update focused on Discover?

​Google rolled out the February 2026 Discover Core Update​

John Mueller / Google

Google released the February 2026 Discover core update on February 5 and specified that the rollout may take up to 2 weeks to complete. This is a broad update to the systems that surface articles in Discover and is aimed to improve the experience in a few key ways:

• Showing users more locally relevant content from websites based in their country.
• Reducing sensational content and clickbait.
• Showing more in-depth, original, and timely content from websites with expertise in a given area.

It's also worthy to note how Google revised its Discover guidelines alongside the core update: The updated guidance now uses the words "clickbait" and "sensationalism" by name. Take a look at what changed.​

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PS: Remember that as an SEOFOMOer you have access to a free Looker Studio Dashboard featuring the Latest Google Rankings Shifts, including those of Google Discover.​

Google described this as a documentation clarification

​Google Updates Googlebot File Size Limit Docs​

Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal

The Googlebot page now lists a 2 MB limit for HTML and supported text-based files, and 64 MB for PDFs. The crawling infrastructure docs list the default for all crawlers as 15 MB.

After shipping in the US, multi-turn search is now available worldwide

​Microsoft rolls out multi-turn search in Bing​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land

Microsoft rolled out multi-turn search globally in Bing. As you scroll down the search results page, a Copilot search box now dynamically appears at the bottom.

It will pay for using your content in its AI

​Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace - Pay For AI To License Content​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

Microsoft announced the expansion of the Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace. This marketplace is designed to give publishers a new revenue stream, provide AI systems with scaled access to premium content, and deliver better responses for consumers.

Why people keep pushing for LLM only formats?!

​Google’s Mueller Calls Markdown-For-Bots Idea ‘A Stupid Idea’​

Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal

John Mueller questioned whether LLM bots can recognize Markdown on a website as anything other than a text file or follow its links. He called converting pages to Markdown for bots "a stupid idea".

• Related: Google: 75% of crawling issues come from two common URL mistakes by Barry Schwartz​

YouTube ad revenue missed expectations

​Google Search Hits $63B, Details AI Mode Ad Tests​

Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal

On the earnings call, the company revealed how it plans to monetize AI Mode and shared new data on how AI is changing search behavior.

• Google is testing ads in AI Mode as Search revenue grew 17% to $63 billion.
• AI Mode queries run 3x longer than traditional searches.

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New Profound Agents: WordPress and Sanity

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Profound Agents can now publish, update, and coordinate work that improves how customers find your brand, products, and services across AI Search.
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• Update content when visibility shifts
• Publish net-new pages for emerging prompts
• Coordinate approvals and reviews across teams

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The most popular 'GEO' tactic might indeed be risky

​Is Google Finally Cracking Down on Self-Promotional Listicles?​

Lily Ray

Self-promotional “best” listicles have proven to be an effective shortcut to visibility in both traditional search and AI-generated answers, but new data suggests that shortcut may be contributing to performance declines in SEO. Lily goes through it.

Learn to influence decision makers

​How to Use Data to Get Buy-In for SEO: Real-World Strategies [Presentation]​

Tina Reis

Tina explains how to use the tools of data storytelling to get intellectual and emotional buy-in for your SEO initiatives.

• Related- Compromise: The Lost SEO Skillset by Nick LeRoy​

A must read and to be bookmarked

​The Complete Guide To Ecommerce SEO in 2026​

MJ Cachón / DebugBear

MJ explains the key strategies and best practices to optimize your ecommerce website in this comprehensive guide.

Breakout opportunities for “trending” stories

​5 quick news SEO wins every editor can get right now​

Jessie Willms, Shelby Blackley / WTF is SEO

From internal linking to highlighting and sharing key lessons with the newsroom; Jessie and Shelby share five tactics that can demonstrate the value of SEO and increase the reach of your journalism.

How do we translate technical findings into stakeholder-ready strategy?

​Beyond the Basics: How to Turn Crawl Data Into Strategic Actionable SEO Insights​

Cassandra May / Sitebulb

Cassandra explains how to look beyond individual warnings and use crawl data to drive real business outcomes across three pillars: content strategy, UX prioritization, and resource allocation.

• Related: JavaScript SEO AMA with Sam Torres: 13 Questions & Answers by Sam Torres​

Uncompressed resources are no. 1

​The Greatest Disaster Hits in Web Performance​

Estela Franco

Estela goes through the major hits that are destroying your project's loading speed, user experience, and business metrics and how to avoid them.

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Ecommerce shifts from ranking pages to enabling transactions

​Winning Ecommerce Organic Search in an AI Era: What are the shifts, and what works in 2026?​

Aleyda Solis

Let’s go through the specific AI shifts for ecommerce search, the current winners and what can we do to win.

EEAT: "Experience" is the AI-Killer

​Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines and YMYL in the Age of AI Search​

Francine Monahan / iPullRank

Francine discusses how AI Search is impacting Google’s search quality rater guidelines and shares some YMYL AI searches to see how their citations stack up.

A journey through prompt engineering and model wrangling

​A framework for AI-Generated Content That Doesn't Suck​

Gianluca Fiorelli / Advanced Web Ranking

Gianluca shares a no-BS framework for AI content that ranks, reads well, and doesn’t suck; tested across Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot with real prompts that scale.

It's time to optimize your feeds & APIs

​How to optimize your website for the agentic web​

Crystal Carter / Wix

If you want your brand to survive this transition, you must move beyond traditional content discovery and build for agentic compatibility. Crystal shares how to optimize your website for the agentic web with this step-by-step guide.

Create prompt clusters to get a directional overview

​How to Choose the Best Prompts to Monitor Your AI Search Visibility​

Glen Allsopp / Ahrefs

Glen goes through an actionable framework to identify and track relevant groups of prompts, not individual responses to successfully monitor your AI search visibility.

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Track Brand Mentions Beyond Google

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Ahrefs Brand Radar helps you track brand mentions where people actually discover products today — in YouTube videos (titles, descriptions, and transcripts), TikTok content, and Reddit discussions that appear in search results.

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See how often your brand is mentioned, which competitors dominate attention, and how visibility changes over time.

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Brand Radar combines search demand, mentions, and share of voice into one clear view, so marketing and SEO teams can understand real brand exposure — not just rankings.

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If your brand lives in search, video, and communities, Brand Radar makes it measurable.

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• ​Senior SEO Analyst at Acadia ​
• ​Senior SEO Executive at Vixen Digital ​
• ​Senior Content SEO Specialist at Hostinger​
• ​AEO & GEO Marketing Manager at Stripe​
• ​Senior SEO Specialist at Media Components​
• ​Content Marketing Manager at TechnologyAdvice​
• ​Intermediate Search Specialist at Hive Digital, Inc.​
• ​Digital Experience & SEO Specialist at Mattermost​