In the top stories for the month, you’ll learn about Google’s new AI Mode for search (and whether it’s the SEO apocalypse some fear), the big announcements made at the I/O 2025 Keynote, and the results of a comprehensive test of AI Overview’s brand visibility factors.
After that, you’ll learn how to use the new AI Max tool released for Google Ads, get the latest updates on the zero-click trend, and find out the results of the landmark antitrust case against Google.
There are even more stories after that. The roundup closes with some early guides for the new tools and features you’ll learn about, and announcements Google has made about the future that you shouldn’t ignore.
Google AI Mode Announcement Analysis
Google AI Mode Announcement Analysis – The Hottest in SEO News with SEOFOMO TL;DR
Aleyda Solis brings you her analysis of the new AI mode announcement from Google.
The announcement, which you can find here, shows off the capabilities of the new mode coming for Google Searches. AI mode has already rolled out across the entire US and may appear for any searches you make in that region.
As the announcement details, this mode has several new features, including a Deep Search capability to gather information from hundreds of sources. It also launches with a live help feature and some agentic abilities.
Aleyda walks you through this entire announcement with SEO Gianluca Fiorelli, covering all the features mentioned in the announcement and the fallout that has happened since.
First, she covers the controversial use of “norefferrer” links in the mode’s sources. This was a discovery that angered many SEOs because it prevented them from tracking referrer data.
Many saw their sites listed in sources, but they weren’t being rewarded for it, or able to track it due to how links were used for the mode’s source section. This turned out to be an error. Google says it should be fixed soon.
Check out her complete video to learn more about what’s happened, and to see her list of recommended guides to help you catch up for a search environment that includes AI mode and other LLMs.
Next, you’ll learn much more about Google’s plans for the future.
Google I/O 2025 Keynote in 32 Minutes
Google I/O 2025 keynote in 32 minutes
The Verge brings you this abbreviated keynote from Google’s I/O conference. The original keynote was hours long, but this video edits out the fluff so you can get all the major announcements in just over 30 minutes.
The video has also been bookmarked by announcement so that you can skip to the most important ones. There are too many to list here, but you can look forward to getting the latest details about all of the following projects:
Google Beam/Project Starline- Speech Translation in Google Meet
- Project Astra/Gemini Live Demo
- Project Mariner
- Agent Mode
- Personalized Smart Replies
- Jules coding assistant
- Gemini Diffusion
- Gemini 2.5 Pro Deep Think
- Scientific AI research apps
- Deep Search
- Search Live
- Visual shopping, virtual try-on clothes demo
- Agentic checkout
- Imagen 4
- Veo 3
- Lyria 2
- Google AI Pro and Ultra
- Android XR
It should come as no surprise that most of these announcements involve AI. These systems will only play a larger role in Google’s operations. In the next piece, you’ll learn how to optimize for one of the biggest ones—Google’s AI overview.
An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors (75K Brands Studied)
https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-brand-correlation/
Louise Linehan and Xibeijia Guan present this report on how your brand can achieve visibility on AI overviews. Their research examined over 75,000 brands to determine what factors corresponded with higher visibility in AIO.
They uncovered a number of interesting correlations over the test, including that:
Brand web mentions show the strongest correlation (0.664) with AI Overview brand visibility.- Web mentions (0.664) correlate much more strongly than backlinks (0.218).
- The top 3 correlations are all off-site factors: brand web mentions (0.664), brand anchors (0.527), and brand search volume (0.392).
Based on the first correlation and other findings, the team found that your brand’s web presence is “everything.” AI visibility is about how often your brand shows up across the entire web. Other SEOs, including Kevin Indig, have reinforced this finding.
Brands that are in the top 25% for web mentions get mentioned by AI 10x more than brands that are in the next quartile (the next top 25).
On the other hand, the team found that AI Overview didn’t seem to care about your link metrics. It also didn’t care about your branded search traffic.
AIO didn’t care how much money you were throwing at paid search. More than 70% of searches had no CPC data. However, AIO also barely appears for monetized terms and is mainly restricted to informational terms.
Louise closes with some tips on how you can track your own brand visibility in search and across the web. Coming up next, Google has launched another big AI product, this time for ads.
Google Launches AI Max
Introducing AI Max …. [Google Ads Major Update]
Aaron Young brings you this look at the launch of AI MAX. Does this feature spell the doom of keyword targeting? Is it just a new paint job on old features? Aaron thinks the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Google’s own announcement calls the feature—
“A comprehensive suite of targeting and creative enhancements that brings the best of Google AI to help you take your Search campaigns to the next level”.
In real terms, AI MAX includes several features to generate your targeting and ads completely. It leverages AI to handle tasks like correcting headlines, writing ads, and developing visual assets.
Aaron starts by explaining how AI Max operates. As you may have heard, you will not launch campaigns using keywords. Instead, you’ll provide the URL for the advertising website, and Google will do the targeting for you.
That doesn’t mean you cannot provide tighter targeting. You can add refinements around negative keywords and other filters to generate more accurate campaigns.
Aaron takes you through all the other features that interact with your campaigns and analyzes who could benefit from being an early adopter. Check out his complete video to hear what he had to say.
For now, there’s a new report about zero-click searches and why the CEO of Cloudflare says it’s destroying the online business model.
CNBC Video Marketing Updates
Cloudflare CEO on the rise of ‘zero-click searches’: It’ll be much harder to be a content creator
CNBC brings you this interview with Matthew Prince of Cloudflare and his predictions of doom for the internet’s current profit ecosystem.
As he points out, 10 years ago, Google sent a ratio of one visitor for every two scrapes of your website content. That rose to one visitor every six scrapes a few years ago. That rose again to 250 scrapes per visitor only a few months ago.
Now, Google scrapes website content an average of 1500 times for every visitor it sends.
Matthew says the reason for this is that these users now mostly stay on the search page thanks to Google’s own design. The searchers may still enjoy your writing or expertise, but they aren’t doing it on your site.
He also argues that this will likely be catastrophic for all businesses relying on ads, subscriptions, or other traffic-related income. He predicts that much of the ad revenue will go to AI engines, and there could be other consequences.
He also recommends that content creators charge AI engines to access their original content, including by giving exclusivity deals.
Check out the complete interview to see all his predictions for the future. For now, there’s news on perhaps Google’s most significant court case.
Google, Justice Department Wrap Up Landmark Antitrust Case
Google, Justice Department wrap up landmark antitrust case
CBS News brings you the close of the DOJ’s case against Google over violating antitrust laws. As the hosts point out, this case started during Biden’s presidency, and has continued under the Trump administration.
The DOJ and a coalition of states who participated in the case are asking Google to share its search data and end its multibillion-dollar payments to Apple and other smartphone makers to be the default search engine on new devices.
Now that the case is being wrapped up with Google losing some claims, there is some talk about what’s possible in Google’s future. DOJ sources have gone as far as to recommend that the Chrome browser be sold, though it’s not clear that the judge is considering that.
Google is aksing for a deal that gives them more opportunity for forward recovery.
Check out the complete story for the latest news on the case. For now, there’s some more news about AIO. It may have a major spam problem.
Google AI Overviews Have a Major Spam Problem
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-ai-overviews-have-major-spam-problem-lily-ray-go74f/
Lily Ray brings you her personal investigation into the spam that has been appearing for some AIO results. Yes, these results are still supposed to be experimental, but she argues that implementation is outpacing the ability to deal with long-standing spam problems.
As one example, Lily points out that hallucinated phone numbers are still an issue with AIO, and Google doesn’t seem to have a plan to fix it. She also shows examples of AIO being manipulated by content to confirm grandiose titles for individuals, such as “best SEO.”
More people seem to be catching on to the fact that AIO can easily be made to repeat certain claims, and Lily predicts that it will soon take its place as one of the shady tactics of SEO.
Lily expresses frustration that Google’s anti-spam tools—once considered some of the most effective in the world—don’t seem to be acting as filters for AIO results. Google spent years destroying the value of most of the spam content online, but their new tools seem to welcome it.
Check out the complete guide to learn more about AIO spam and how top SEOs are responding to it. For now, there’s something more you should know about the antitrust case from the last story. A Google engineer testified, and provided some exciting details for marketers.
Googler’s Deposition Offers View of Google’s Ranking Systems
Roger Montti brings you this breakdown of redacted testimony that was given to the court regarding Google’s ranking systems.
While some of the information about the algorithm specifics is redacted, what is available will give you a very high level understanding of how ranking signals work.
The testimony discusses how Google handcrafts the signals it uses by starting with data from quality raters, clicks and other sources. This data is applied to mathematical and statistical formulas to generate a ranking signal.
The testimony covered three kinds of signals that are referred to as “ABC Signals” and correspond to the following:
- A – Anchors (pages linking to the target pages),
- B – Body (search query terms in the document),
- C – Clicks (user dwell time before returning to the SERP)
The engineer described these signals like this—
“ABC signals are the key components of topicality (or a base score), which is Google’s determination of how the document is relevant to the query.
T* (Topicality) effectively combines (at least) these three signals in a relatively hand-crafted way. Google uses to judge the relevance of the document based on the query terms.”
In the whole document, the engineer describes ranking development, the interplay between page quality and relevance, what the engineer doesn’t like about AI, and more about PageRank, as well as a cryptic signal that uses Chrome data.
Check out the complete story to learn about everything revealed between the lines. There may be even more revelations as the court case continues to close. If there are, you’ll learn about them in an upcoming roundup!
