The Hottest in SEO This Week from #SEOFOMO - March 9, 2025

The hottest stories in SEO are here from the latest SEO FOMO newsletter. Pretty much your SEO FOMO to lunch and read. Today's edition is brought to you thanks to the sponsorship of SimilarWeb. Now let's go through them. The first one is Google announcement on the AI overviews expansion and the introduction of AI mode. On one hand, Google has pretty much revamped/improved AI overviews with Gemini 2 in order to improve its capabilities, efficiency, and quality in responses. On the other hand, Google has introduced a new AI mode experiment in Search. This AI mode uses a custom version of Gemini 2 that is particularly helpful for questions that need further exploration, comparisons, and reasoning. You can ask nuanced questions that might have previously taken multiple searches, like exploring a new concept or comparing detailed options. The best is that Google gave directly in there a way to opt in for this new experiences in Labs, which I did as well as many others, and we got access pretty quickly. So I have directly already published yesterday a blog post going through my 5 early observations about this new Google AI mode in Tasks. Here I have shared how this new AI mode visibility and usage pretty much rely on AI Overviews inclusions since the most affordable way to go to it is with this dive deeper in AI mode button that is shown at the end of AI Overviews that will take you to the AI mode UI where the answer that you previously had gotten through AI Overviews will be expanded, improved, and will get a much better structure, a more comprehensive, many times expanding on the sources that are taken into account. So although there's an option to the left of the all search results, the traditional search results, to go to AI mode, it can be pretty much overlooked because it's not something that users are really used to click on. Besides this, and how much more comprehensive answers are, is that in many circumstances there are clearly highlighted blue links directly featured within the AI mode answers going directly to the sources, unlike of what happens at the moment in AI overviews. So I believe that this is really great news in terms of website traffic. Finally, although AI mode gives usually a better expanded experience, for factual or informational queries, for comparisons, for example. The reality is that it provides a suboptimal experience for product-oriented commercial queries, for which, for a good reason, Google is not even showing an AI overview. And in order to go and take a look at the AI mode answers, you need to go and click directly into the AI mode tab option. So I highly recommend you to opt in to test it in case you haven't yet. Take a look at my blog post about it to go through more insights. I will be definitely expanding more on this. The next most popular resource was this insightful analysis and research from Advanced Web Ranking, Dan Popa, sharing the Google click-through rate stats evolution from the last Q from 2024 versus the previous one. Going through how different click-through rates can go between different industries, the impact that AI overviews have had for informational desktop queries. We can see how there has been an increase of over 8.8 percentage points of AI overviews in informational desktop queries from Q3 to Q4, while there has been a surprise, surprise, -7.3 percentage point decrease in the click-through rate of the combined top 4 ranked websites. So this is definitely showing how the inclusion of AI overviews are hurting the click-through rate of the traditionally ranked top positions. It also features a table going through every industry and the click-through rate change for mobile and desktop of the first, second, and third position during this period of time, along with the evolution of the search demand. So I will definitely go and take a look at this data and validate if it aligns with what you have seen with your own websites and clients' websites too. The other top resource of the week is this very insightful and comprehensive SEO forecasting guide from the Botpresso team. It goes through the fundamentals of SEO forecasting, the pros and cons of using first-party data and third-party tools that allow us to do forecasts. Key metrics to take into account to develop accurate forecasts, the different type of methodologies that you can use from time series analysis, regression models, as well as the different scenarios that you should take into account when planning SEO forecasts, the best case average and worst case depending on your own particular context. So if you haven't yet started with SEO forecasting or want to double-check in order to see how you can refine your approach, I highly, highly recommend you this very comprehensive resource from BotPresso. Last but not least is this guide from Matthew Mellingher from SEO Gads. He shares five reasons why you should count queries in Search Console because this is something that, although you might not think is very very useful, it can end up being a very practical way to measure topical coverage and expansion, finding answers to performance inconsistencies, validating cannibalization fixes, tracking local SEO expansion, as well as understanding the quality of your query growth. He goes through each one of these reasons here. Last but not least, I want to thank SimilarWeb. That is today's sponsor. Similarweb doesn't only allow you to analyze traditional organic search metrics, but goes beyond and allows you, for example, to assess the performance of your site versus other players within your own sector, taking a look at how they are performing through every marketing channel and what's working better for category leaders in whatever country. So if you haven't had the chance to take a look at it, I highly recommend you to do. It's a tool that, as you can see, I use myself and I find it to be very useful in my own SEO analysis. And remember, if you don't want to wait until the next newsletter or the Too Long Didn't Read video to go through the top SEO news, you can go and take a look at SEO FOMO News, news.seofomo.co, to keep track of the latest in SEO in real time. Thank you very much again for your time. Remember to subscribe to avoid missing any new videos. And until the next week, bye-bye.