Hey everyone!

Last week's issue touched briefly on Google I/O 2026 and the Google Marketing Live 2026 event that followed right after, and I said I'd cover both at the depth they deserve this week. I'm keeping that promise. This whole issue is dedicated to those two events and what came out of them.

Because the impact of I/O 2026 didn't end within a week — it spread. Two days after the event, the May 2026 Core Update began rolling out. Marketing Live wired the entire ad stack around Gemini. Mike King wrote a sharp objection to Google's new AI guidance. WordPress 7.0 and Screaming Frog 24 shipped. So this isn't an event; it's the start of an era change.

The core message of this issue is one sentence: search has evolved from ranking to selectability.

Grab your coffee. Let's dive in.

At the I/O 2026 event held on May 19, 2026, Google announced the most fundamental transformation of the search box in the last 25 years. AI Mode reached 1 billion monthly active users and AI Overviews 2.5 billion, while Gemini 3.5 Flash became the new default model. Search now accepts text, images, files, video, and even an open Chrome tab as input; information agents run 24/7 in the background; Generative UI builds a custom interface for every query. Through a GEO lens, the picture is this: AI pulls 40–50 sources per query, narrows them to 12–20, and cites 3–8. For the SEO industry, one sentence sums it up: it's no longer about ranking, it's about being selected as an input to the AI's answer.

In his opening keynote, Sundar Pichai announced that the Gemini app had reached 900 million monthly active users. But the number that really struck me came from the Search side: AI Overviews reached 2.5 billion monthly active users, and AI Mode hit 1 billion in just one year. Google described this as "the fastest product adoption we've ever seen."

The new AI-powered search box no longer accepts just keywords; it takes text, images, files, video, and open Chrome tabs together as input. In Search Engine Land's words, this is "the biggest change to the search box in 25 years." The bar that has worked on a "type a word, get ten blue links" logic since 1998 has turned into a research assistant; on top of that, it now offers AI-powered question suggestions beyond autocomplete.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is four times faster than rival frontier models; it became the default model of the Gemini app, AI Mode, and Spark. Gemini Omni is a multimodal model that understands text, audio, image, and video simultaneously; it's available free as a remix feature in YouTube Shorts. Gemini Spark is Google's 24/7 personal AI agent, with Gmail, Docs, Canva, and Instacart integrations, offered in the new $100/month AI Ultra plan.

The quietest revolution of I/O 2026 was information agents. The user enters a request in natural language ("notify me if a 3+1 apartment comes up in Çekmeköy"), and the agent works in the background for days, scanning the web, news, price and stock data, and sends a notification when the criteria match. The paradigm shift for SEO: the user is no longer someone making a one-off query; your page is in a 24/7 evaluation pool.

Generative UI designs the interface of the answer on the fly: an interactive simulation for astrophysics, a personal dashboard for finance, a 3D component diagram for how a watch works. Search builds this interface in the moment with Antigravity and Gemini 3.5 Flash. The result: the SERP is no longer uniform; the same query can return a different interface to a different user. The page you thought you "won" may appear on the user's screen only as a component — or not at all.

This also explains why the concept of "ranking" loses its meaning. LLMs are non-deterministic by nature; because of temperature settings, re-ranking layers, and real-time retrieval, they can give different answers to the same question at different times. Generative UI makes the interface variable on top of that. That's why the new success metric in GEO isn't "ranking" but citation probability: how often you appear when you ask the same query 10 times across different sessions. There's no fixed #1; there's appearing in 7 out of 10 attempts.

One of the least-discussed but most directly SEO-relevant decisions at I/O 2026: Google is placing ads inside AI Mode answers. This turns AI Mode from an experimental feature into a growing monetization surface for Google.

The new ad formats are clear. Conversational Discovery Ads answer a user's question directly inside AI Mode; Gemini generates the ad creative for that specific query in real time rather than serving a static asset. Highlighted Answers place sponsored results inside AI Mode's list-style recommendations. On top of these come AI-powered Shopping ads and Business Agent for Leads, a smart brand agent you can chat with inside the ad itself. All formats carry a "Sponsored" label and include an independent Gemini-written explainer. Conversational Discovery Ads and Highlighted Answers are currently being tested in the U.S. on mobile and desktop.

The SEO takeaway is clear. The AI Mode answer you're trying to be cited in organically now also contains ads. So the visibility competition is no longer just with other brands — it's with paid placement too. This doesn't make organic GEO work pointless; on the contrary, as the paid space grows, being the organically "selected" source becomes more valuable. But set expectations correctly: AI Mode is no longer a purely organic surface.

On the YouTube side, Ask YouTube was announced. In response to complex queries, the AI finds the most relevant content across long videos and Shorts and produces a structured, interactive answer you can ask follow-up questions about. Two takeaways for video SEOs: video transcripts and timestamped chapter markers are now far more critical; and videos with crisp, bite-sized answer segments that "the AI can lift and use" will stand out.

On the hardware front, new Android XR smart glasses will be on shelves this fall; partnerships with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster were announced. Live translation, Gemini-powered navigation, and notification summaries come as standard. For local SEO, glasses-based search is a whole new category: "what can I eat here" queries will now be asked out on the street, aimed at the storefront you're looking at. Google Business Profile maintenance, structured data, and "near me" signals will take on a whole new importance over the next year.

"Selectability" isn't an abstract slogan; it's a process with clear mechanics. AI search engines work with RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation): when a user asks a question, the model splits it into 3–5 sub-queries (query fan-out), pulls 40–50 sources from the web, narrows them through mathematical fusion to 12–20, and finally cites 3–8 sources.

The critical insight: your citation probability is directly proportional to how many times you appear in that initial 40–50 source pool. Let's lock it down with semantic triples:

So GEO doesn't replace SEO; SEO gets you into the pool, GEO gets you out of the pool into the citation. Content that performs poorly in traditional search is almost never visible in AI search.

Which content types get cited more? Our data is clear: content with original research and data gets cited 2x, video transcripts 2x, comparison content 1.7x more. Content from the last 6 months is cited 3x more often than content older than 2 years — even if that older content ranks #1 in traditional search. In the age of information agents, this freshness advantage is no longer a preference but a requirement for continuous visibility.

One more rule: the GEO roadmap is not just for Google. Google's guide describes a single ecosystem; our strategy also accounts for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini. A tactic Google calls "unnecessary" can be meaningful for non-Google engines. A warning is also in order: inflating content, manufacturing synthetic citations, and faking schema to get cited — all of these are treated as spam by Google and Microsoft, with a penalty risk. Stradiji never recommends these tactics.

Everything up to here is information available to anyone following the I/O news. Now I want to share our own experience. At Stradiji, we run our GEO campaigns through the GeoGenie.ai platform; we track the question "who gets cited in AI Mode" not in theory but in real client projects. Let me be transparent: we don't yet have a published, comprehensive case study, but we do have an honest field observation.

We saw three things. First, citation lists fluctuate day to day; the same prompt can return different source sets within the same week. Measuring on a single day and concluding "we lost" is a mistake — we look at the weekly average. Second: for a while we had been tracking AI Overviews and AI Mode separately, because they were different surfaces with different citation behavior. At I/O 2026 Google merged the two into one seamless Search flow. For us, this merger actually clarified an important lesson: the only meaningful metric to track now is not ranking but AI Visibility. While Google answers most queries with zero clicks, the real question is whether your brand appears inside the AI-generated answer. Through GeoGenie we measure this with three metrics: Visibility Score (in what percentage of answers you appear), Share of Voice (your share against competitors), and Citation Rate (how often the AI links to your site). Third, and most important, pages with a clean answer block get cited more often; pages that meet the question in the heading, give the answer in the first sentence, and separate out definitions and numbers instead of burying them in a paragraph score higher on the GeoGenie dashboard. This is direct field validation of the BLUF and "structure that preserves meaning" rules in our AEO methodology.

I'm sharing these observations not as a hard law but as an honest field note. As we accumulate enough data over the coming months, we'll turn them into a publishable case study. For now I can say this: after I/O 2026, GEO became a matter of "measurement," not "guesswork," and a brand that doesn't measure is flying blind. Since GSC and GA4 still don't report AI Mode clicks separately, manually testing target queries in AI Mode and noting who gets cited is the most reliable method today.

No official date has been announced for AI Mode's full launch in Turkey; however, at I/O it was announced that Personal Intelligence would expand to roughly 200 countries, which means Turkey will be in scope too. The lesson we take for our clients at Stradiji: brands producing Turkish content need to build their AEO and GEO infrastructure now. Because on the day AI Mode fully launches in Turkey, it's a plausible scenario for unprepared brands to lose a significant portion of their organic traffic in a short time. The Pew Research data is clear: on queries with AI Overviews, the click-through rate sees a 46.7% relative drop; in Ahrefs' measurement, the CTR of #1-ranked pages falls 34.5%.

Search Engine Land's most striking I/O 2026 article happened not on stage but in the hallways. When Google product managers who weren't on stage were asked about overlapping features, the answer was one word: "velocity." Four separate managers said the same thing. This has two consequences for GEO: first, the retrieval and citation logic of AI Mode will change many times over the coming months — chasing a single "winning formula" is rowing against the current. Second, that's why Stradiji's GEO approach leans not on a single tactic but on a durable foundation: core SEO health, non-commodity content, multi-engine visibility.

Google Search Central published its new "generative AI guide" on May 15, 2026. According to the guide, there's no need for llms.txt files or special AEO/GEO markup; AEO and GEO aren't a separate discipline, they're core SEO applied to the AI surface. Search Engine Journal summed it up as "still SEO."

Reading I/O 2026 with a single voice would be a mistake. Lily Ray reminded everyone that "GEO spam" tactics carry a long-term algorithmic penalty risk. Barry Schwartz detected visible volatility in rankings after I/O. Mike King made the sharpest objection to Google's guide in Search Engine Land: "the guide is one opinion" — and the opinion of the company with the most to lose in a multi-engine world. Search Engine Journal's "the risk is somewhere else" analysis completes the nuance: the threat isn't technical, it's economic; as information agents spread, the click-demand problem will grow.

My take (Mert Erkal). King is technically right — AEO and GEO require a separate budget and reporting. But Google's "what wins hasn't changed" side isn't wrong either. I've been in this business since 2009, and I see the same mistake in every major transition: people either panic and rebuild everything from scratch, or deny it and do nothing. Both are wrong. The right stance is to take King's economic warning seriously without abandoning Google's "fundamentals" side. Make GEO a separate budget line — but spend that budget on genuine non-commodity content, not synthetic tactics. In this business, the patient and well-grounded win, not the fast imitators.

The clearest message out of I/O 2026: search has evolved from ranking to selectability. At Stradiji we've been in this business for 17 years; this transformation runs deeper than even the mobile-first index. The good news is that the fundamentals haven't changed: demonstrate expertise, convey experience, speak with original data, keep your technical foundation clean. The bad news: speed matters. When AI Mode launches in Turkey, brands that aren't ready may be forced to shut down the organic-traffic growth engine they built.

Google made a full 100 announcements this year. The ones touching our field: Gemini Omni Flash (video editing with natural language), NotebookLM Literature Insights (turns scientific literature into searchable tables, useful for content research), Google Pics (a visual creation tool rivaling Canva), Stitch (live interface design), Google Flow (multi-clip video generation, music), Gemma 4 (an open model small enough to fit on a phone), Gmail Live (voice conversation with your inbox). On the developer side, Antigravity 2.0 added scheduled tasks and a CLI; Chrome introduced WebMCP and "Dev Tools for agents."

Google Marketing Live 2026 (May 20) wired the ad stack around Gemini. AI Mode–specific Conversational Discovery Ads and Highlighted Answers are being tested; Ask Advisor unifies all the ad tools into a single conversational interface. AI Performance Insights came to Merchant Center, and Dynamic Search Ads will be upgraded to AI Max in September 2026. OpenAI also expanded its ChatGPT Ads Manager with geo-targeting.

The May 2026 Core Update began rolling out on May 21; it's the fourth ranking update of the year. The next few weeks will be choppy — review content quality without panicking. WordPress 7.0 brought a Web Client AI API to core and a new Breadcrumbs block valuable for SEO. Screaming Frog 24 shipped with an MCP integration; you can now run crawls with natural language from inside Claude, and we've started using it in our GEO audits.

1. Run a commodity audit on your pages. If your content is nothing more than a summary ChatGPT could produce on its own, it can't pass the "non-commodity" filter. Add first-hand data, original research, real case examples.

2. Test your AI Mode visibility manually. GSC and GA4 still don't report AI Mode clicks separately. Ask your target queries in AI Mode and note which domains get cited.

3. Refresh your content for information agents. Agents look for "changing data." A visible last-updated date, "what's new" sections, and structured changelogs should be clearly visible.

100. The total number of announcements Google made at I/O 2026. In a single event: a search box revision, three model lines, a personal agent, and dozens of tools. Google has moved from "adding an AI feature" to "rebuilding the product on top of AI."

The completion of the May 2026 Core Update rollout, the release of Gemini 3.5 Pro, and the first real-world behavior of information agents once they open to subscribers in the US. That last one will be the most critical signal for GEO strategy.

Google I/O 2026 wasn't an event; it was the start date of an era change. The search box was reborn, the ad stack was wired around Gemini, the core update is rolling out. The common denominator: search has evolved from ranking to selectability. The good news is that the fundamentals haven't changed. Demonstrate expertise, convey experience, speak with original data, keep your technical foundation clean. If you want to increase your brand's visibility both in traditional search and on AI platforms, at Stradiji we're here with our 17+ years of experience.

See you next week with new developments — take care of yourselves!

Mert Erkal

Stradiji | SEO, GEO & Conversion Optimization

I've linked most of the sources inside the relevant paragraphs. The following are additional sources not directly referenced in the text:

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About Mert Erkal Founder of Stradiji. 15+ years in SEO and GEO consulting for corporate clients globally. Author of SEOs Diners Club (English) and Dijital Pazarlama Notları (Turkish).