Aleyda Solis covers the week's top SEO news: Google's experimental AI search modes like Med Explainer and Neural Chef, a Google Search Central event where the company claimed 50% of web content is spam, and guides on ranking in AI overviews and scaling an SEO freelance business to $1 million.
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The latest, most popular stories in SEO from your latest SEO FOMO. Pretty much your SEO FOMO to lunch and read. Today's edition is brought to you by the sponsorship of SimilarWeb. Let's go through them. The most popular story of the week has been the coverage from Barry Schwartz about Google testing AI search options beyond AI mode. This comes from a finding by Tom Critchlow, that he shared on LinkedIn showing how Google enabled for him many more different AI mode options that look like specialized agents. For example, Med Explainer, Neural Chef, Fact Checker, Airport AIO. Tom mentioned that when he clicked on any of these additional AI surf features, the results didn't change that much, but the URL parameters did. So even if this test hasn't been even yet released to the public, it's interesting how Google is playing around this idea of specialized AI mode that I believe can be certainly much more helpful than a generic AI mode or interface for different verticals, for example, shopping. Let's see if they follow up with any of this in the future. The second biggest story was the coverage from, again, Barry Schwartz about the Google Search Central Live in New York that happened last week. In this edition, Barry covered how Google made presentations about how they are fighting spam, mentioning how 50% of the content of the web is pretty much spam, defining EAT, and doing a little bit of midstream busting about site reputations and penalties. Google also did a few clarifications about scaled content abuse and AI content, specifically regarding the use of generative AI alone does not mean that there is scaled content violations, but it is important to ask a few questions that they share here in order to assess its quality and intent. They also share about Google Search Console performance report integrating the information about AI features while also confirming that AI overviews cannot be filtered out, how grounding works for AI answers, and more. So definitely give it a look. Let's see if with the questions regarding AI overviews, which have also been done in previous editions and online, they change their stance regarding filtering it out as a specific segment in the performance reports of the Google Search Console. I believe that this can be certainly helpful to help communicate its value and impact. The other most clicked resource this week was Gianluca Fiorelli's guide about how to become visible in both Search and LLMs, a guide about semantics in SEO. He explained the strategy that he follows with clients and provides a specific case study of how he did to start showing in AI overviews. He uses this case study to explain how content can become visible through LLMs, the different concepts that you must know in order to start optimizing for it, and clarifying some common doubts about the importance of entities. It's certainly a very, very comprehensive guide that I highly, highly recommend you to go and take a look at. The other most clicked resource is my presentation from last week at the SEO Sydney conference regarding SEO for brand visibility and recognition. I go through not only the importance of taking brand into account in your SEO process, but also I explain the different steps to take in order to maximize your brand visibility from the usage of structured data for your brand entities, to consistent brand mentions and backlinks, to positive mentions and reviews in third-party websites, and much more. Go and take a look. And last but not least is the comprehensive resource by Nick Leroy about how he turned his side hustle into a $1 million SEO freelance consultancy, sharing 6 things he wished he had known before he became a freelancer. This is very practical, no-nonsense advice that I will highly, highly recommend. That if you ever want to become a freelancer, go and take a look. If you're already a freelancer, you should totally go and check out. I wish that I had this resource when I first started. Finally, I want to finish by thanking this week's sponsor, which is Similarweb. Similarweb is a tool that I use a lot, especially to validate a few metrics that cannot be easily found in other tools, like the percentage of zero clicks in queries that I am actively targeting and the share of clicks that is attracted by the top-ranked pages for a specific query or a group of queries. If you haven't yet started using Similarweb, this is your chance to check it out. I hope that you have enjoyed the latest stories, and if you want to keep up with the latest SEO news during the week, go and take a look at the SEO FOMO News, subscribe to the newsletter too, and remember to subscribe to this channel and follow me to avoid missing out the next edition of the SEO FOMO to Learn During Read. Until the next one, bye-bye.
