🚀 Google AI Mode is (almost) going Global and more - #SEOFOMO TL;DR August 25

Let's go through this week's biggest search stories in SEO FOMO to London Read. Thank you to Similarweb who's sponsoring our today's edition. The biggest story of the week was Google announcement of a test of new agentic features for AI mode, although for a cost, and the AI mode expansion globally across 180 new countries, but not in the EU yet. Yet. Things are moving very fast for AI mode, but Google is already releasing it pretty much worldwide, but in the EU yet, I imagine that due to higher legal privacy sort of constraints. It has also announced the start of a test of their agentic capabilities, starting with restaurant reservations and expanding soon to local service appointments and event tickets. Google provides an example saying that you can now ask about getting a dinner reservation with friends that includes multiple constraints and preferences like party size, date, times, locations, preferred cuisine, and AI mode will streamline this process searching across multiple reservation platforms and websites. Google mentions how they are leveraging live browsing capabilities of Project Mariner, direct partner integration on search to help users take action on the web, and they are already working with partners like OpenTable Ticketmaster, and StubHub, among others. The thing is that this test is only available to the Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US. So unless you have already subscribed to Google AI Ultra, that has a cost of €129.99 per month, you won't be able to use it yet. I guess that the agentic feature consumes many more resources, so Google cannot just give it away for free, which also might have implications in the future if it means that Google won't be releasing their AI mode agentic features to anybody. Let's see. The second top story of the week is this article from The Information saying that they have found that OpenAI is challenging Google while using its search data since they have investigated and validated they are using data from Google. Through SERPAPI, a web scraping service, and that this data reportedly helps ChatGPT answer real-time queries about news, sports, and financial markets, all areas where OpenAI's in-house tools are still playing catch-up. So as you can see, I have moved to Tom's Guide to take a look at the coverage from the Information article because unfortunately I don't have access to it, but this is also not surprising based on my own and a few others' research as well, who had found a clear correlation of Google SERPs and the information that Insights provided in ChatGPT answers. It seems that they might not necessarily be scraping Google directly, but using third-party services like SERP API. Now I grab my popcorn to see if Google ends up doing anything. What do you think? The other top resource of the week is this AI versus search traffic dashboard that is completely free, vibecoded by the Ahrefs team. Team and provided to give an easy way to check the traffic referred by traditional search engines like Google and Bing versus AI assistants to 44,421 websites. This can be a great reference to share to decision makers who want to do extreme shift towards AI search and to those who mentioned that traditional search is dead. Here's the link for you to check it out. Very handy resource. Thank you very much to Ahrefs for this. The next top resource is an actionable guide by Kevin Indig about 5 ways to adapt your content strategy for LLMs. Kevin provides handy actionable ways to improve and expand the content you create in a way that actually connects with your user journey, abandoning easy answers, adding something new to the conversation, Letting users solve tasks on sites and building modes beyond search, among others. So this is a resource that I highly recommend you to check out. It's straightforward and provides examples of resources that will make your content better, not only for LLMs, but for your users as well. And last but not least is this comprehensive guide by Clara Suteras about the future of SEO for news publishers, going through not only the challenges that publishers are suffering, with AI overviews, but also what they can do in order to change the trend, start attracting more organic search traffic, and avoid losing visibility more and more due to AI overviews or AI mode. From changing KPIs and understanding the business and fostering customer loyalty to becoming an authority, building a brand, and becoming a reference point. But for all of this, she provides very specific tactics to create a memorable experience and developing a community that actually allows you to do this with examples as well. So definitely a must-read, especially if you do SEO for publishers as well. I want to thank again Similarweb that allows you to obtain a lot of insights about AI traffic from prompts, top pages. You can also compare AI traffic from the one of traditional search of any sites among many other insights. So I highly recommend you to go and check out all of the new reports and AI traffic insights that they have to offer. Finally, in case you have missed it, I released a few days ago the SEO FOMO State of AI Search Optimization Survey with a giveaway. Yes, I have partnered with some amazing tools like SimilarWeb, again, Peek AI, Sitebulb, SparkToro, JackTalkToPose, Advanced Web Ranking, Wordleaf, YK to give access for free to the lucky winner, along with an SEO FOMO hoodie and mug that you can win as well, just by answering, taking this AI search optimization status survey. So in case you haven't, go and check it out and answering to have a chance to win these awesome prizes. And if you don't want to wait until the next edition of the SEO FOMO newsletter or this SEO FOMO to Launch Day in a Bit video, go and check out the SEO FOMO News where you can monitor both about the latest SEO and AI search stories as well. Thank you very much again for watching, and until the next week, bye-bye.