Google will Need to Share Data with Competitors - #SEOFOMO TL;DR September 8, 2025

Let's go through the latest top stories in SEO in today's SEO FOMO: Too Long; Didn't Read. Thanks Similarweb for sponsoring today's edition. The most popular story from this week's SEO FOMO newsletter was the coverage by Barry Schwartz going through how Google won't need to be broken up as the result of the monopoly case, but will be required to share key data with competitors. Now, as I mentioned in the newsletter, Google will be barred from entering or maintaining exclusive contracts related to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app. However, it will not be barred from paying device makers to preload its products. Also, Google will have to make certain search index and user interaction data available to competitors. But Google has said anyway that they plan to file an appeal, which means that it could take years, literally, before it's required to act on the ruling. So don't expect the search index and user interaction data to be shared very soon. Marie Haynes did a fantastic analysis going through all what the trial docs reveal about clicks, links, and other ranking signals that I highly, highly recommend you to go through. The second top story is the coverage of Google's Danny Sullivan presenting at a recent event saying that good SEO is also good GEO. The coverage by Danny Goodwin shares how this is not the first time that a Googler has mentioned this since Gary Illyes also said something similar back in July in one of their events. In this case, Danny said at the Working Conference in the US on August 28th that if you don't know what GEO is, it's like the latest acronym, but the basic things have not changed. Good SEO is good GEO. What you've been doing for search engines generally, and you might have thought of as SEO, is still perfectly fine. It's still the things that you should be doing. Although I agree that good SEO is good GEO, I think it can be a little bit of an oversimplification here to think that you don't need to change anything and you can just continue to do what you were doing for traditional search engines to maximize your opportunities also for AI search platforms. These platforms have different user agents, different behavior, different interfaces that require certain nuances in the way that you do things. Also remember that the crawlers of some of them don't even render JavaScript yet as Google is able to. So although I agree that yes, good SEO also means good GEO, it doesn't mean that you don't do to shift and to update certain things, to expand certain things in order to make sure that you can better tackle the specific behavior and characteristics of these new platforms. Of course, this doesn't mean that you need to start from scratch and ditch completely what you have been doing in SEO. But just personalize it to the new different platforms in a way that is consistent and reasonable based on this new platform's impact, which in most cases is from 1 to 2% of the traffic and revenue still. So although it's important to get ready, it's definitely important to put things into context at this point. The next top story shows the interest that there is around the impact of LLM traffic to our website businesses. Is a piece from Will Guevara of Answerive sharing a study that they did analyzing LLM traffic conversion and comparing it with the one of traditional organic search to validate if it's really better or not. They analyzed different verticals. He goes through all of the methodology here. And at the end, the result is that although in certain cases it does better, the results showed that LLM traffic did not convert significantly differently from organic, but both channels converted at a similar rate. And the apparent uplift in the averages was not consistent across sites to be considered meaningful. So the answer from this research was that it could not be validated that LLM traffic converts really better than traditional organic search one. And speaking of conversion, the last most popular piece of the week is the interview of Gianluca Fiorelli with Ram Fishkin going through the importance of branding in the age of AI and zero-click SERPs in order to maximize the impact of your site and revenue despite losing clicks and traffic. Rand mentions how zero-click is the big shift, not AI. Clicks still matter, but as zero-click searches rose, influence now happens directly in SERPs and AI overviews, and how beyond awareness, brand and memorability are what truly moves the needle, and how SEO can support branding using structured data, knowledge graph optimization, and even sentiment-driven clustering to reinforce brand identity. This is a must-watch interview with Ran in order to better understand how we can also diversify our efforts in order to optimize our presence in other platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit that are dominating user focus at the moment. I want to thank again Similarweb for sponsoring today's edition of SEO for Motulandia in Read, and I highly recommend you to check it out in order to better understand your audience engagement. Your traffic, organic, traditional, paid, and even AI traffic, doing a benchmark with your top competitors. Check it out. Thank you very much for watching today's episode. And if you want to keep up with the latest in SEO without waiting for the next SEO FOMO newsletter edition of the SEO FOMO to Learn Daily Read, go and take a look at the SEO FOMO News aggregator. Thank you very much again. And until the next week, bye-bye.