The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

July 19, 2026
​Subscribe Now​

Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by +45.2K SEOs.
Today's sponsor is Semrush. Ask to advertise here.​

More free actionable AI search insights from Microsoft

​Microsoft Clarity introduces Topic Insights: Actionable Content Recommendations ​

Ihab Rizk / Microsoft

Microsoft Clarity has launched Topic Insights in beta, extending Citations with topic level visibility, influence, competitor and opportunity analysis. Microsoft recommends treating its outputs as directional.

Google says these changes could endanger user privacy and security

​It’s official: EU will force Google to share search data and open up AI on Android​

Ryan Whitwam / Ars Technica

The EU’s finalized DMA requirements will force Google to share anonymized Search data with eligible rival search engines and qualifying AI chatbots from January 2027. Google must also let users activate competing AI assistants by voice and allow them to perform actions across Android apps, with those changes expected from July 2027.

Useful AI shopping visibility data, although clicks are still missing

​New Google Merchant Center AI Performance Insights For AI Mode & AI Overviews​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

Google is piloting AI Performance insights in select US Merchant Center accounts, showing organic AI share of voice, competitor benchmarks, query frequency and query types across AI Mode and AI Overviews. The pilot is expected to expand to Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand.

• Related: Google To Merge Google Shopping Ads & Free Listing Policies To One Policy by Barry Schwartz ​

Google Search is becoming an image generator too

​Google AI Overviews will let you create images​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land

Google is bringing image generation into AI Overviews, powered by its latest Nano Banana model. The feature will roll out in English over the coming weeks wherever image creation in AI Mode is already supported.

More opportunity for news publishers inside AI Overviews?

​Top Stories roll out in Google AI Overviews​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land

Google has fully rolled out Top Stories and news updates in AI Overviews for some developing topic queries on mobile in the US, with prominent links that can also highlight Preferred Sources.

Your Page Indexing report is not a score that needs to reach 100%.

​How to read the Indexing Report [Video]​

Martin Splitt, John Mueller / Search Off the Record Podcast

Martin Splitt and John Mueller explain how to interpret Search Console’s Page Indexing report, why many excluded URLs -such as redirects and 404s- can be expected, and when discovered or crawled not indexed patterns point to technical or site quality problems.

Build your strategy with the definitive study into AI visibility

AI visibility isn't uniform. Performance diverges sharply across platforms and industries, meaning a strategy built for one environment can fail to perform in another.

Semrush's AI Visibility Index tracks 126 million prompts across 22 industries and ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. It's our biggest ever piece of research into AI visibility, complete with playbooks, expert guidance, and deep-dives into the winning brands.

Build a strategy that wins across where your audiences search. Start with the AI Visibility Index.

Cheap content creation doesn’t make crawling and indexing free

​Why Scaled AI Content Fails: Google’s Crawl Economics Explained​

Dan Taylor / Search Engine Journal

Dan explains why mass programmatic AI initiatives can stall when large volumes of repetitive, low-value URLs fail to justify continued crawl and indexing resources. The issue isn't AI use itself, but scaling content without enough demand, originality or value.

• Related: 10 Creative Ways to Write with AI (Without Losing Your Soul) by Mateusz Makosiewicz​

Build something users need to use, not another answer AI can summarize

​The Free Tools SEO Strategy: How to Rank With Calculators, Converters, and Generators​

Ryan Law / Ahrefs

Ryan shows how calculators, converters, generators and templates can capture “do” intent that articles and AI summaries can’t fully satisfy, then shares a process to find, validate, build and ship the right tool.

SEO competency gets the interview; memorable proof of curiosity can win it

​The Worst Thing You Can Be in an SEO Job Interview Is Forgettable​

Nick LeRoy / SEO for Lunch

Nick argues that standing out doesn’t require becoming famous. It means giving interviewers something memorable: an experiment you ran, a tool you built, a community you helped or a project that demonstrates genuine curiosity about your craft.

A traffic drop needs a diagnosis, not an automatic content refresh

​4 types of content decay and how to fix each one​

Ashish Jacob / Search Engine Land

Ashish explains how to distinguish ranking decay, zero-click capture, intent drift and demand decay using Search Console data and the live SERP, then apply the right fix instead of reflexively refreshing every declining page.

There's no single SaaS AI Search playbook

​What It Takes for SaaS Brands to Win in AI Search: 5 Data-Backed Findings and Actions​

Aleyda Solis

Aleyda analyzed 15 SaaS brands across three US subverticals and found five consistent patterns: third-party sources generate 84% to 93% of citation weight; ChatGPT and AI Mode prefer different external evidence and different parts of a site; cited pages often differ from AI referral destinations; and the right playbook depends on the category’s primary job.

A new machine readable format is not automatically a new SEO tactic

​The Open Knowledge Format: what Google really shipped, and why the interesting question is not SEO​

Gianluca Fiorelli

Gianluca separates what Google actually specified from the SEO industry’s interpretation: OKF is designed to package knowledge for enterprise agents, not to improve Google Search visibility, and no major answer engine currently discovers website hosted bundles by default. He also explains which adoption signals could change that.

• Related: AI Agent Standards - What Do We Need to Know? by Chris Green​

One prompt and a confident conclusion don’t make an AI Search test

​AI/LLM Experiment Community Standard 0.1​

Tory Gray, Shaun Davidson, Anne Berlin, et al. / The SEO Community

Tory, Shaun, Anne, Micah and Joshua propose a 10 part community checklist covering hypotheses, environments, verification, metrics, repeatability, constants, interpretation, transparency, replicability and presentation, making AI and LLM experiments easier to evaluate and reproduce.

Not every AI visibility shift was caused by something you changed

​How do LLMs secretly change? Tracking invisible shifts in query fan-outs and source retrieval​

David Konitzny

David shows how changes in query fan-outs, preferred sources and retrieval loops can alter citations and brand visibility even when a site hasn’t changed. His takeaway: monitor the retrieval process, not only the final answer, before attributing every movement to your own optimizations.

• Related: Google AI Mode's shift to citing itself by Davis McCain​

• ​SEO & AI Search Specialist at StudioHawk​
• ​SEO & GEO Associate at Seer Interactive​
• ​SEO Specialist at Xigen​
• ​SEO Manager at Givebutter​
• ​ASO Specialist at Windscribe​
• ​SEO Strategist at House Buyers​
• ​SEO Specialist at North Coast Medical​
• ​SEO for tutoring company Australia at Apex Tuition Australia​

Reddit and YouTube are consistently among the most-cited sources in AI answers. Similarweb estimates their AI referral traffic is 10X apart.

Across major AI citation studies, Reddit and YouTube consistently appear among the most-cited sources, for example, Semrush's AI Visibility Index, based on 126 million US AI search prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini and AI Overviews, places Reddit among the most heavily cited sources across platforms, with YouTube and Wikipedia also in the top tier.

However, Similarweb's worldwide Gen AI channel estimates (28 days ending July 16) show that YouTube received an estimated 203.5 million AI-referred visits vs. 20.3 million for Reddit, roughly 10x more. 20 million monthly visits is substantial, but these are two platforms in the same citation tier attracting very different referral volumes.

Why the gap? One likely contributor is how much value the AI answer can deliver without the click: a Reddit discussion can be quoted and summarized directly, while a video gives users a stronger reason to visit for the full demonstration or experience. Also, platform scale, integrations, query intent and the mix of AI surfaces also influence it, and since these are platform level estimates from different datasets, this doesn't establish a traffic-per-citation rate for any individual brand.

The takeaway: Citation rankings tell you where AI answers look, not where AI users go. Track citations as a visibility and evidence KPI, and referrals and conversions as separate impact KPIs. If clicks are the goal, invest in experiences whose full utility can only be unlocked by visiting: video demonstrations, tools, calculators, interactive data and downloadable assets.