Aleyda Solis covers Google's completed August spam update, which hit sites with low-quality content in lyrics, recipes, and finance. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Pulse, a personalized feed for Pro users. Cloudflare proposed a Content Signals Policy to let publishers control AI training access via robots.txt.
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This week's biggest search story from the latest edition of the SEO FOMO newsletter. Let's go through the top stories of the week. Among them, Google's August 2025 spam update finishing rolling out and an initial analysis and much more. Thank you to SimilarWeb who's sponsoring today's edition. The first story of the week is that Google's spam update finally finished rolling out on September 22nd, taking almost a month. Since its initial release on August 26th. I have been going through a few sites that dropped in organic search visibility during this update and identified a few patterns. It's interesting to see how many of these had been previously affected by former Google spam and core updates and had been dropping on many occasions since Google's June core update, if not before. So their drops likely have to do with much more than just the spam update effects. Many of these are also informational-focused sites in the lyrics, recipes, and financial advice space featuring ads and reviews. And in quite a few cases, they're showcasing pages created at scale with non-unique, low-quality content, including spammy comments as well. This update has been certainly much harder to isolate and identify specific causes since the sites that had been affected tend to share the same nature than the ones that had been previously hit. As you can see here, if you have been affected, I would love to hear about it and you can leave your comments below. The second top story is the release of ChatGPT Pulse that sounds a little bit like ChatGPT version of Google Discover. OpenAI is releasing a preview of ChatGPT Pulse to Pro users on mobile. This is a new experience where ChatGPT proactively does research to deliver personalized updates based on your chats, feedback, and connected apps like your calendar. You can curate what ChatGPT researches by letting it know what's useful and what isn't. The research appears in pools as topical visual cards you can scan quickly or open for more detail. So each day starts with a new focused set of updates. And OpenAI mentions how this is the first step towards a more useful ChatGPT that proactively brings you what you need. As you can see in the screenshot examples here, this seems to be a much more comprehensive, action-driven version of what Google Discover does. The third most popular story is the new proposal of Cloudflare called the Content Signals Policy, which is a robots.txt directive to establish your content access to AI platforms at scale and with the needed granularity. Cloudflare explained how this new policy allows to better specify the level of access that we want to be able to give to AI platforms, since the current directive in the robots.txt unfortunately are not able to do this. They have even created this website called contentsignals.org to be able to generate the directive as needed, allowing to establish rules for AI training, AI search, and AI input, differentiating the experiences and accesses. These websites also allow us to generate our own set of rules based on our preferences. I believe that this is a first step to a much needed standard to be able to better control the access of AI platforms to our content. Let's see if it is leveraged by websites and respected by AI platforms. Another top story this week is the guide from Tomek Rudzki with ideas for successful content in AI search. He mentioned how he has been analyzing the type of content that better performs in AI search answers, finding that features and benefit pages, competitor comparison content, curated lists, as well as FAQ sections tend to perform very well. He explains further and provides examples and guidelines to be able to craft this type of content to maximize the performance. This is a must-read in case you're taking efforts to optimize your content for AI search. Last but not least is the resource from Chris Lever about how to fix Shopify crawl issues in Screamy Frog and Sitebook using their new Web Bot Out feature. Until now, it was many times hard to be able to crawl Shopify-based websites at scale due to too many request errors after a while. But Shopify has now rolled out a new feature called the Web Bot Auth that allows you to authorize crawlers such as Screaming Frog, Sybil, JetOctopus, or Oncrawl in order to access your website and assess your e-commerce optimization. He goes through the steps that you need to take. And how to configure it with your favorite SEO crawler. This is a must-read if you do ecommerce SEO with Shopify sites. I want to finish today's edition by thanking Similarweb, who's our today's sponsor, that offers a wealth of not only search, but web and app analytics metrics across every channel, including AI traffic. Go and check it out in case you haven't yet. And remember, if you don't want to wait until the next week for the next edition of the SEOFOAM newsletter, Check out the SEO FOMO News Leaderboard aggregator with the latest top news in the sector and subscribe to the channel to avoid missing any new editions of the SEO FOMO to Long-Term Read videos. Until the next one, bye-bye.
