The Hottest in SEO This Week from #SEOFOMO - May 12, 2025

Let's go through the top SEO news of the week with today's SEO FOMO to Learn, Then Read, brought to you by the sponsorship of Similarweb. This week's top story was the coverage by Roger Monte about how Google updated the Quality Raters guidelines to target fake EEAT content. Google Quality Raters has now this new section about deceptive purpose, a webpage with deliberately inaccurate information to promote products in order to make money from clicks unmonetized links. Examples include a product recommendation page on a website falsely impersonating a celebrity blog or a product recommendation based on a false claim of personal independent testing when no such testing was conducted. There is also a brand new section about fake EAT expanding this further. So I would recommend, if you ever thought that faking EAT was a good path to follow, to rethink it because it's obviously not a good option if you want to safely keep your results while avoiding any issues. The other top story is Matt Southern coverage about Google's walled garden that incentivizes users to make 10 clicks before leaving. This is the coverage from a report and analysis done of the search behavior, traffic, and insights from Google versus ChatGPT developed by Tyler Emberger, in which among other insights, Tyler identified that Google's pages per visit metric has climbed to 10 as of March 2025, which is, as we can see here, an important increase from what it was before. This means that users spend more clicks on Google search results than on other websites. Increases pages per visit for google.com is an indicator that users are spending more clicks within Google search results, since most SERP interactions like interacting with SERP features, paging, refining searches, or clicking images change the URL but keep the visitors on Google's domain. Interesting enough, This is something that was highlighted by Cyrus Shepard in this other article that was also featured in the latest edition of SEO FOMO, showcasing how in the old Google, search results pretty much referred traffic to publishers and then to ads and Google properties. But with AI Overviews, a lot of the traffic is staying in ads and within Google properties. Let's remember that last month, Google officially rolled out links in AI Overviews, going to its own search results. So in different ways, Google is trying to keep users engaged within its own search results while all of this is happening. And it connects well with this other top story about Apple saying that Google searches are down on Safari. Of course, Google responded saying that no, searches are up, but it was pretty interesting to see how Apple's Eddy Cue disclosed that searches on Google via Safari were down last month for the first time in 22 years, which he attributed to people using AI. Q said that he believed that AI search providers including OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic will eventually replace standard search engines. After this, Google stock price dropped 8%, and Google denied it. But we see all of these ways that Google is trying to retain users more into their properties. So there's definitely that. The other top story of the week is Semrush AI overview study going through 10 million keywords Including clickstream data analysis from Datas, which is also a Semrush company. Some of the key takeaways and stats are that AI overviews are obviously on the rise, with more than 30% of all queries triggering AI overviews in March 2025, a lot more than the 6.49% in January 2024. Informational content being the most likely one to trigger AI overviews, with 88.1% of queries triggering AI Overviews being informational, and additional information about zero clicks. On average, keywords that trigger AI Overviews show higher zero-click behavior, likely due to their informational nature too, which aligns well with previously shared data about AI Overviews. I highly recommend you to go through the insights because there's definitely much more. Last but not least, I want to finish today's SEO FOMO to London read by thanking Similarweb. Similarweb is now also offering AI chatbot traffic in case you want to be able not only to measure yours, but also take a look at how it compares with the other players in your sector. And they don't only feature the distribution over the different AI chatbot platforms and the evolution over time, but they also have the top landing pages attracting AI traffic and a set of examples of the prompts that have triggered this traffic, which is quite interesting to start tracking this type of queries and optimizing for them further. If you haven't checked out SimilarWeb, now might be a really good time to start doing it. So to analyze your AI traffic. Thank you for watching today's edition of the SEO FOMO to Lunch Daily Read. And if you want to keep up with the latest in SEO without having to wait for next week episode or the next newsletter, go and take a look at the SEO FOMO News, which is your source of the latest in SEO in real time. Thank you very much again. And until the next week.