Aleyda Solis covers four SEO shifts: Google's Preferred Sources feature lets users pick favorite publications for Top Stories, OpenAI's GPT-5 is trained to be intelligent not knowledgeable (making RAG and SEO critical), Google Travel launches an AI Flight Deals tool that bypasses traditional filters, and analysis of 300 ecommerce pages shows FAQs and intent matter more than length.
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Let's go through this week's biggest search stories with SEO FOMO Too Long, Didn't Read, sponsored by Similarweb. The top one story of the week is Google launching the preferred sources in the US and India. Google has announced that it will allow now users to configure the top stories they see in search results already in the US and India. They share this step-by-step showcasing how they can select their preferred sources to visualize them below the generic top stories that are relevant to any topic they search. You will still see content from other sites and you can manage your selections at any time, but this will allow users to have a more personalized experience coming from their favorite publications. If you're a publication, I will highly, highly recommend to ask users to add you as one of their preferred sources. You can add one of the deep links that Google has shared for this purpose already to your social posts or promotion, and also include a preferred source button alongside with all the social call to actions for which Google actually provides a resource. I asked SEO FOMO subscribers what they thought about this new release, if this was going to be positive and help trusted sources to gain visibility, or if they considered this to be negative. Reducing the diversity of voices. Most of the people have so far said that it is negative because it will reduce the diversity of voices. Let's see what is the traction of this new feature and what's the final outcome in a few weeks. The next top story is another proof that SEO is not dead, powered by a research from Dan Petrovic of OpenAI's GPT-5 latest model, sharing how this model is trained to be intelligent, not knowledgeable. Relying on external data sources and integrations and RAG in order to actually make it knowledgeable, making SEO irreplaceable. Dan goes through documentation that has been published sharing about this. Go and check it out. The other most popular resource this week is yet another Google release, a new flight deals functionality that is AI powered. Maybe you didn't know this, but Google has a very well-established Google Travel Hub. Under google.com/travel that allows any users to search for flights, hotels, and even holiday rentals that has been growing so much in the US that it's now attracting almost the same organic search traffic as Kayak and over other players like Skyscanner, for example, and is already ranking in top positions for terms like flights, cheap flights, or plane tickets. So it's actually not new that Google provides flight search functionality, but what it is actually new is that This new Flight Deals is focused to be an AI-powered conversational experience that doesn't need the users to go through all of the filters, but can search as it is shown here on screen, any type of characteristics for the flights, and they aim to provide an accurate answer. This release will be rolling out in the next few days in the US, Canada, and India, and I can think that it will help them only establish further as a leader in this sector. If you work in the travel sector in SEO, this is something that I will be paying a very close attention to. And last but not least, a research of James Brockbann going through how much content do top-ranking ecommerce category pages really have and what do you actually need to perform well. In this analysis, he went through the data of 300 top-ranked ecommerce category pages to identify what is the best content length. And in reality, what he found is that you don't necessarily need a lot of content. What is actually important is the type of content. So he validated that you don't need long blog-like guides beneath the product grid, often diluting the commercial intent of the page. But there's a higher correlation of well-ranked category pages that feature very well-targeted FAQs that actually support the buying journey. So it's all about quality and intent alignment rather than quantity. If you want to learn more insights about this research to back up your recommendations, go and check it out. Thank you again to Similarweb for sponsoring today's episode. In fact, I use Similarweb to go through the traffic insights of the google.com/travel directory. As you can see here, the tool allows you to see not only the top-ranked queries, but the queries that are actually bringing more traffic and which are the ones that are actually growing over any period of time. Versus others, along with other metrics to do organic search traffic analysis. Go and check it out. Thank you very much again, and remember to subscribe to the SEO FOMO newsletter to avoid missing out. Until the next week, bye-bye.
