The SEOFOMO Newsletter​

May 31st, 2026
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Your weekly SEO & AI Search News to Stop the FOMO, read by +45K SEOs.
Today's sponsor is SE Ranking. Ask to advertise here.​

Does this mean more traffic from AIOs & AI Mode?

​Google shares new ways to find your favorite sources and original content in AI Search​

Duncan Osborn / Google

Google is expanding Preferred Sources to AI Overviews and AI Mode, making links from users’ selected favorite sites more visible in AI Search results. It’s also adding new link carousels for fresh/developing topics and expanding “Highly Cited” labels to highlight original reporting and frequently referenced sources.

A timely reminder

​Google Strongly Warns Against Manipulating Mentions For AI​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

Gary Illyes said at the Search Central Live Sydney 2026 event on May 15th that he and Google strongly warn against buying or manipulating brand mentions to try to appear in AI responses, AI Overviews, and AI Mode.

Helpful to understand what Google aims to reward, but not a rankings blueprint

​Google: Search Quality Raters Guidelines Not A Guide For Search Rankings​

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable

John Mueller said that the Google Search Quality Raters guidelines are not a guide for search rankings: "It is sometimes worth pointing out that while the Search Quality Raters Guidelines are insightful to read through, they're not a guide for search ranking".

From finding answers to completing tasks

​Sundar Pichai: Google Search, AI agents, and tools will become one​

Danny Goodwin / Search Engine Land

Sundar Pichai said Google’s AI search box, app-building tools, and agent products will eventually converge. He also rejected publisher fears that Google will stop sending traffic to the web. AI Mode still isn’t the default Search experience, but Pichai outlined a future where Search, Gemini, and agents merge into a single AI layer for finding information, creating content, and completing tasks.

Learn what changed Reddit’s openness

​Reddit CEO Says LLMs ‘Would Not Exist’ Without Reddit Data​

Matt G. Southern / Search Engine Journal

Steve Huffman said LLMs "would not exist as we know them" without Reddit and called the platform's content "modern oil" for the modern internet. On new data licensing deals, he said the company is "open for business." Huffman says Reddit's community is "starting to reject" AI-written content through downvotes.

SEOFOMO is less than 5K subscribers away to reaching the big 50,000 subscribers milestone and we’re celebrating by giving back to the search community helping us get there.

Refer fellow search marketers to the free SEOFOMO newsletter and each verified new subscriber you bring in gives you one additional eligible entry in the giveaway to win:

• 1 Grand Prize Winner who will choose one eligible SEO conference experience worldwide from the available options, including a conference ticket, SEOFOMO swag, and a private SEO / AI Search Q&A session with Aleyda Solis.
  ​
  Partner conferences include MozCon, Search n' Stuff, BrightonSEO, Shenzhen SEO Conference, SEO Sydney Conference, Athens SEO, SERP Conf, SearchNorwich XL, Belgrade SEO Conference.
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• 5 Community Experience Winners who will join an exclusive virtual SEO & AI Search group Q&A session with Aleyda Solis and WTSFest London 2027 Recording Ticket.

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The campaign starts on May 31st, 2026 and ends when SEOFOMO reaches 50,000 verified subscribers, or on December 31st, 2026, whichever comes first.

Participate by subscribing to the SEOFOMO newsletter and sharing it with your search marketing friends and network with your referral link (get it at the bottom of the newsletter).

Initial core update visibility shifts

​May 2026 Core Update: Visibility Analysis and Data Updates​

Steve Paine / Sistrix

The May 2026 Core Update was announced on May 21st. The update is still rolling out, but Steve shares initial data and examples of some affected domains.

The anatomy of an enterprise SEO changelog

​SEO changelogs: The missing layer of enterprise site governance​

Owain Lloyd-Williams / Search Engine Land

Enterprise SEO teams can’t afford invisible website updates. Owain explains how changelogs help surface risky changes before they impact traffic and revenue.

Common causes and how to validate them

​19 Ways to Diagnose a Decline in Organic Traffic​

Seer Interactive

Is your organic traffic down? Here are 19 ways to diagnose the cause, from algorithm updates to AI Overviews absorbing clicks at the top of the SERP.

How to quantify SEO opportunity in revenue terms

​How to Translate SEO KPIs into Business Impact​

Alyssa Corso / Women in Tech SEO

Alyssa explains how to connect SEO KPIs to real business outcomes by translating rankings, traffic, and conversions into revenue impact, growth opportunities, and ROI that leadership teams actually care about.

Homepages are AI traffic sinks, but not the citation footprint

​AI Traffic vs AI Citations: What Clicks and Cited Pages Show About the AI Search Journey​

Aleyda Solis

I analyzed Semrush April 2026 US data across 40 sites in Travel, Finance, Real Estate and Retail to compare AI traffic vs AI-cited pages. The research shows that AI citations and AI referrals reflect different layers of the AI Search journey: citations tend to surface discovery and evaluation pages, while AI clicks often land on brand, transactional or task-oriented pages. Learn what this means for your AI search optimization efforts.

• Related: The AI Search Optimization Checklist – With Worksheet [Updated May 2026] by Aleyda Solis​

Put visible human fingerprints on the output

​The AI Convergence Problem​

Mark Williams-Cook

Where LLMs are weak, they're stupid. Where they're strong, they're dragging your marketing toward the mean. Mark shares how LLMs don’t think, they predict the next token and what this means for digital marketing.

• Related: Schema, LLMs and the Low Bar for “Evidence” in GEO by Mark Williams-Cook​

Surprise, surprise!

​“I tested Claude SEO Agents so you don't have to.”​

Daniel Foley Carter / Assertive Media

Daniel has tested Claude's SEO agents and skills to see if they have what it takes to compete with an SEO performing a site audit. “NO, the answer is a unanimous NO”.

• Related: How curious are agents/chatbots? by Chris Green​

Search type no longer predicts behavior

​Users behave differently in AI Overviews vs. AI Mode​

Kevin Indig

A new clickstream study of 846K sessions shows AI Overviews turn the SERP into a comparison environment, while AI Mode produces acceptance.

• Related: AI Overviews is the most undertracked AI search: 500,000 prompts show why by Tomek Rudzki​

The XML Sitemap for AI systems

​EntityMap: An Open Standard for AI-Readable Content​

Fred Laurent, Dixon Jones

EntityMap is a proposed open standard for publishing a structured, entity-first index of website knowledge for AI systems, retrieval pipelines, and language-model-based applications: Where sitemap.xml tells crawlers what pages exist, entitymap.json tells AI systems what a site knows.

• ​SEO Data Analyst at Twinkl​
• ​SEO Strategist at OuterBox​
• ​Associate, SEO Strategy at DEPT​
• ​SEO Strategist at Today’s Business​
• ​SEO & AI Search Specialist at Infosys​
• ​SEO, GEO & Content Strategist at Stratabeat​
• ​eCommerce SEO Strategist at DigitlHaus Agency​
• ​Senior SEO & Web Content Specialist at UniGroup​

It’s been a tough week for many in SEO and digital marketing with a few talented professionals sharing that they’ve been affected by layoffs recently, and I’d love to help by giving them more visibility through SEOFOMO.

I asked in LinkedIn for SEOs and digital marketer looking for a new role to leave their profiles in the comments, along with the opportunity they’re looking for. I've compiled a list of those who have shared they're open for new roles so far, as well as companies hiring SEOs & digital marketers.

Also, If you're looking for a new role and want to get featured in the page, please submit your LinkedIn profile and the opportunity you're looking for via the contact form here. If you're hiring and want to feature your job, submit it too.

Finally, Mark Williams-Cook is kindly offering his Complete SEO Course From Beginner To Professional to those looking for a new job for free until June 21st, 2026 with the voucher code: 84052F393F4381CE7072 (it has 100 redemptions, the maximum Udemy will give).

BreakingSilos 2026: Build the Ecosystem That Wins

The industry leaders aren’t smarter than you. They’re sending better signals. Here’s why.

While most marketing teams are still optimizing individual channels, the brands pulling ahead in AI search are doing something different: they’re building visibility ecosystems where SEO, social, PR, content, and brand reinforce each other. And AI is citing them for it.

BreakingSilos 2026 is a free online conference on June 9th. For the first time, the practitioners building those ecosystems—from SEO and PR to Content, Brand, and Social—are all in one room.

Save your seat now and learn to own the ecosystem.