SEO and GEO Newsletter by Mert Erkal

The SEOs Diners Club

Founder of Stradiji, SEO & GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) specialist Mert Erkal breaks down what's really moving in AI Search, GEO, and SEO — every week, backed by real tests and data.

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Latest Issues

AI Visibility

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #243 - I Combined Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Here's the Free GEO Funnel Nobody Is Using.

Oct 19, 2026

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9 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #243 - I Combined Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Here's the Free GEO Funnel Nobody Is Using.

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools each show half of your AI visibility. Combined, they give you a free four-question GEO funnel. Here it is, run on my own site and a US SaaS site.

Mert Erkal

AI Visibility

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #242 - I Asked AI for the Best GEO Agency. It Cited Agencies That Ranked Themselves #1. Then It Recommended Someone Else.

Oct 12, 2026

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10 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #242 - I Asked AI for the Best GEO Agency. It Cited Agencies That Ranked Themselves #1. Then It Recommended Someone Else.

I analysed 137 pages and 156 citations behind "best GEO agency" answers. 12 of 12 agency lists included their publisher, 9 at #1. AI cited them and recommended someone else. Plus: in Turkey, that consensus is for sale.

Mert Erkal

AI Generated Content

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #241 - Google Didn't Ban AI Content This Week. It Banned Publishing What Nobody Read.

Oct 5, 2026

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6 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #241 - Google Didn't Ban AI Content This Week. It Banned Publishing What Nobody Read.

In the middle of its September spam update, Google quietly rewrote two documents. "Low effort" now has a written definition: AI text at scale that nobody reviewed. Five signs your traffic drop is about it, what to do, and the one check to run this week.

Mert Erkal

The Full Archive — 230+ Weekly Issues

AI Visibility

Oct 19, 2026

•

9 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #243 - I Combined Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Here's the Free GEO Funnel Nobody Is Using.

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools each show half of your AI visibility. Combined, they give you a free four-question GEO funnel. Here it is, run on my own site and a US SaaS site.

Mert Erkal

AI Visibility

Oct 12, 2026

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10 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #242 - I Asked AI for the Best GEO Agency. It Cited Agencies That Ranked Themselves #1. Then It Recommended Someone Else.

Mert Erkal

AI Generated Content

Oct 5, 2026

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6 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #241 - Google Didn't Ban AI Content This Week. It Banned Publishing What Nobody Read.

Mert Erkal

ChatGPT Ads

Sep 28, 2026

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8 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #240 - ChatGPT Ads Reach Everyone Except the People Paying for ChatGPT.

ChatGPT ads run on Free, Go and logged-out sessions. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu are ad-free. That single line decides whether this channel can reach your buyer, and it's the last thing agency decks mention. Four questions to answer before you fund it, the setting you should switch off today, and the four OpenAI bots most teams block by mistake.

Mert Erkal

zero-click search

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #239 - HubSpot Lost 140 Million Visits and Posted Record Revenue. The Part Everyone Stops Quoting.

Sep 21, 2026

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12 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #239 - HubSpot Lost 140 Million Visits and Posted Record Revenue. The Part Everyone Stops Quoting.

Everyone shares the first half of the HubSpot story, and everyone stops at the same comfortable conclusion: the lost traffic didn't matter anyway. The people who actually lived it correct that in the very next sentence, and the correction is the useful part. Plus new industry data showing 39% of teams lost traffic while holding or growing conversions, and my own measurement of AI Overview coverage in Turkey versus the US. There's an 18-point gap, and it tells you how much time you have.

Mert Erkal

cro with claude

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #238 - Rankings Up Nine Positions. Clicks Down 18.5%. The Fight Moved Onto the Page.

Sep 14, 2026

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11 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #238 - Rankings Up Nine Positions. Clicks Down 18.5%. The Fight Moved Onto the Page.

I've wanted to write this one for months but didn't have clean enough data. Now I do. A client's search data over twelve months: impressions down 38%, average desktop position up nine places, click-through rate up 32%, and absolute clicks still fell. Good SEO isn't the problem. The market got smaller. That doesn't end SEO, but it changes the arithmetic: you now have to convert more of the fewer people who arrive. The good news is that conversion work no longer needs an expensive tool stack. Claude Cowork, free Microsoft Clarity, the GA4 you already have, and your own eyes will do. I'll walk through the setup step by step, and show you three blockers I found on an e-commerce signup form in two minutes.

Mert Erkal

ChatGPT

Sep 7, 2026

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8 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #237 - ChatGPT Built Its Own Search Index. And Not Just One, Twelve.

"ChatGPT uses Google or Bing" got corrected this week, and then argued with. The Peec AI team documented ChatGPT's own family of indexes: web, PDF, YouTube, news, Wikipedia, local, finance, legal, medical, shopping and more. The evidence runs from sworn court testimony to job postings, from live A/B tests to a billion-page crawl experiment. But the objections underneath the post are serious too, and almost nobody read them. I read both.

Mert Erkal

loop engineering

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #236 - But Claude Doesn't Say That." Stop Asking Chat Windows for SEO Decisions.

Aug 31, 2026

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10 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #236 - But Claude Doesn't Say That." Stop Asking Chat Windows for SEO Decisions.

A client challenged my recommendation with a screenshot this month. The screenshot was confident, well written, and produced by a session that had never seen the site. Will Scott's piece in Search Engine Land this week shows the mechanism underneath: give an AI execution authority and it produces what looks finished, not what is correct. The fix isn't a better model, it's a loop around it. Memory, tool access, meeting transcripts, a verification checklist and a learning mechanism. Plus ten SEO MCP servers I verified myself this week, and the WebMCP support OpenAI just shipped.Part of a series: GEO Roadmap > Working Discipline with AI. For the last few weeks we covered what the model says about you on the outside. This week we move to the other side of the table: how are we running that model in our own work?

Mert Erkal

non-commodity content

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #235 - Google Doesn't Penalize AI Content. It Penalizes Commodity. Scale Decides Which One You Made.

Aug 24, 2026

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10 min read

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #235 - Google Doesn't Penalize AI Content. It Penalizes Commodity. Scale Decides Which One You Made.

The panic that started with Claude's text watermark turned into "write with AI and you're finished." Google's own documentation says the opposite in its very first sentence: generative AI is useful for researching a topic and for adding structure to original content. What gets penalized isn't the tool, it's producing many pages without adding value. A viewer on my YouTube channel asked a sharper question than the industry has been asking, so this week I answer it on two axes: do you have original data, and at what scale are you publishing it? Lily Ray's 220-site study shows what scale does. Then I add my own: an AI engine wrote out its own reasoning for shortlisting us, and it never once asked who wrote the content.Part of a series: GEO Roadmap > Content Quality and Citability. Over the last few weeks we covered how the model decides who to recommend. This week we go back to the start of the chain: how should we produce that content, and where is the line?

Mert Erkal

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Latest Issues

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #243 - I Combined Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Here's the Free GEO Funnel Nobody Is Using.

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #242 - I Asked AI for the Best GEO Agency. It Cited Agencies That Ranked Themselves #1. Then It Recommended Someone Else.

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #241 - Google Didn't Ban AI Content This Week. It Banned Publishing What Nobody Read.

The Full Archive — 230+ Weekly Issues

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #243 - I Combined Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Here's the Free GEO Funnel Nobody Is Using.

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #242 - I Asked AI for the Best GEO Agency. It Cited Agencies That Ranked Themselves #1. Then It Recommended Someone Else.

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #241 - Google Didn't Ban AI Content This Week. It Banned Publishing What Nobody Read.

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #240 - ChatGPT Ads Reach Everyone Except the People Paying for ChatGPT.

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #239 - HubSpot Lost 140 Million Visits and Posted Record Revenue. The Part Everyone Stops Quoting.

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #238 - Rankings Up Nine Positions. Clicks Down 18.5%. The Fight Moved Onto the Page.

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #237 - ChatGPT Built Its Own Search Index. And Not Just One, Twelve.

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #236 - But Claude Doesn't Say That." Stop Asking Chat Windows for SEO Decisions.

🔥 SEOs Diners Club #235 - Google Doesn't Penalize AI Content. It Penalizes Commodity. Scale Decides Which One You Made.

The SEOs Diners Club

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