🔥 The SEOs Diners Club - Issue #172 - Weekly SEO Tips & News

Welcome to the 172nd edition of SEOs Diners Club, where we decode the signals that matter in search. I'm Mert Erkal, and after 15 years of watching search evolve, I can tell you we're witnessing the most fundamental shift since the birth of PageRank.

The Future of SEO: Search Everywhere Optimisation

SEO as we knew it has left the building.

The game we've been playing for the past two decades? It's over. Google's AI mode launch has created a paradigm shift, where search results are no longer just based on queries, but on user behaviour, habits, and their entire digital world. If your brand can't be discovered across various ecosystems before someone searches, you'll struggle to appear when they do search.

This transformation has given birth to what I call "Search Everywhere™" optimisation.

The question of whether our traditional understanding of SEO—that Google-focused optimisation we all know—is still sufficient has become incredibly relevant. The resources at our disposal, the conversations in our industry, all point to one truth: the game has changed. SEO's future lies in multi-platform optimisation.

What is Search Everywhere Optimisation?

Search Everywhere Optimisation is SEO's evolved form. It's not limited to traditional search engines like Google or Bing. Instead, it aims to be visible on every platform where your target audience exists, where they search for or discover information, ideas, or products.

Originally conceptualised by Ashley Liddell and trademarked by Deviation Agency, this approach recognises that search has evolved from being a platform to becoming a behaviour pattern.

As Rand Fishkin suggests, the 'E' in SEO should no longer stand for 'Engine' but for 'Everywhere.' This represents a significant mindset shift. Search Everywhere Optimisation isn't just about ranking high on Google. It's about influencing audiences wherever they consume content, seek answers, and make discoveries—including TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Discord, Snapchat, and even AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.

This approach focuses on cross-platform, behaviour-driven discovery. Simply optimising for keywords is no longer enough. You need to create platform-specific, social-first, purpose-driven, and repurposable content. Success is measured by metrics that go far beyond traditional Google rankings.

Why This Shift is Happening

Several fundamental factors drive this radical change:

Audience Behaviour Evolution: Younger generations, particularly Gen Z and Millennials, often turn to platforms like TikTok, Reddit, or YouTube before Google when searching for information or discovering products. OFCOM research shows that in the UK alone, 2 million adults have stopped using Google—a significant signal of change.

Rise of Social and Creator Content: Content on other platforms tends to be more visual, shorter-form (like short videos), more authentic, and more easily consumable. Getting information from a 30-second TikTok video requires less effort than reading a 2,000-word blog post. Content creators and communities accelerate the discovery process.

Personalised and Frictionless Discovery: Platform algorithms offer users a much more personal discovery experience. While traditional search journeys can include many abandonment points, discovery journeys on social platforms are shorter, more snackable, and stickier. Algorithms can surface relevant content for days or even weeks based on previous interactions.

AI Tools Proliferation: AI-powered chatbots and summarisation tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are becoming the new front doors to information. People can sometimes get information directly from these tools without ever visiting a website. This forces brands to think about how they'll appear in AI responses and how they'll emerge as trusted sources. In the future, AI tools integrating with e-commerce platforms to offer direct shopping capabilities could completely change the rules of the game.

The Discovery Universe: Channels Beyond Google

This new "discovery universe" where Search Everywhere Optimisation takes place includes various platforms:

TikTok: The new generation's discovery engine. Used for product recommendations, reviews, tutorials, and lifestyle inspiration. Fast, visual, and authentic creator-focused content.

Reddit: The internet's conversation layer and trusted communities. The go-to place for honest opinions, niche recommendations, and deep research, where brand perceptions are formed.

YouTube: Long-form content for trust-building, plus rapid access through 'Shorts' in short form. Still important for how-to videos, product reviews, and in-depth content. AI mode is expected to use YouTube content.

Pinterest: Visual search and intent-driven inspiration platform. Captures early intent in areas like design, fashion, and health, where users plan before traditional searching.

Instagram Reels: Short-form video stream. Used for trend participation, aesthetic storytelling, and leveraging community validation.

Discord: Community-driven search in niche communities and private channels. Where trusted peer recommendations and word-of-mouth marketing are effective.

Snapchat: Gen Z's sleeping giant. The Snap Map feature holds potential for local businesses, and increasing shopping integrations make it a potential competitor.

AI Tools (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude): New front doors to information. Important for brands to emerge as machine-readable and trusted sources.

Each platform has its dynamics, algorithms, and user expectations.

Implementing Search Everywhere Optimisation

To succeed in this new order, here are the steps to take:

Listen and Analyse Your Audience: The first step is understanding where your audience is, what they do, and which platforms they use for search or discovery. You can examine referral traffic sources through Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Analyse on-site behavior with tools like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity. For example, if you see a video on your website getting more views than text, it might make sense to put more weight on YouTube SEO.

Develop Platform-Specific Optimisation Strategies: Playing by each platform's rules is essential. ASO (App Store Optimisation) for mobile apps, Google Maps, and Bing Maps optimisation for local businesses are critically important. A successful strategy varies depending on your audience type and business. For instance, if you have a Gen Z target audience, focus on TikTok; if learning-focused, focus on YouTube.

Expand Your Content Strategy: Create social-first, purpose-driven, reusable/repurposable content. Content should trigger discovery moments rather than just target keywords. Develop content types suitable for different platform formats (short videos, images, community posts, etc.).

Integrate AI Into Your Strategy: AI is a powerful assistant in the Search Everywhere Optimisation process. It can be used in areas like competitor analysis, content production (for YouTube thumbnails or blog FAQs), sentiment analysis (from comments or Reddit discussions). AI can also help scale your cross-platform strategies. Combined with automation tools (Zapier, Make.com, N8N), more efficient processes can be created.

Measure Success with Multi-Metrics: Measuring success by looking only at Google rankings is no longer sufficient. Focus on each platform's metrics. Views, likes, subscribers for YouTube; impressions, directions for local businesses; engagement, brand mentions for Reddit/Discord; brand mentions and citations for AI bots are important indicators. Approaches that combine different platform metrics to offer more holistic perspectives like "real search metrics" are being developed. Assisted conversions and user journeys in GA4 can be analysed to track conversions. In the future, direct shopping integrations in AI tools will simplify conversion measurement.

Ultimate Goal: Branded Search: The real purpose of all this effort is to get people to search directly for your brand when they need it. That is, encouraging them to type "[Your Brand] + [Their Needs]" into the search bar. This is moving from being passively discovered to being actively searched for. Every touchpoint across different platforms (a view, a comment, an AI suggestion) contributes to the ultimate branded search by building brand awareness and establishing trust. This is not just SEO success, but also a powerful brand investment.

AI Search Models Patent Analysis and New SEO Strategy

We're witnessing a revolutionary breakthrough in the search world.

We're now transitioning from deterministic, direct-match-based classic search models to probabilistic models that extract meaning, diversify queries, and personalise results. At the centre of this change are Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews systems. Mike King's article, published this week, "How AI Mode and AI Overviews Work According to Patent Analysis and Why We Need a New Strategic SEO Focus," beautifully summarises this new transformation.

Three Core Mechanisms According to Patent Analysis

AI-powered search models work on three fundamental mechanisms:

Query Fan-Out (Query Diversification)

AI goes beyond the original query to create contextually meaningful new queries. For example, a query like "good coffee in Istanbul" gets enriched with alternatives like "quality coffee Istanbul" or "third-wave coffee shops European side."

SEO Action: You now need to optimise your content not just for target keywords, but also for semantic variations that AI might generate. Each page should address a universe of meaning.

Reasoning

AI doesn't just extract information; it evaluates that information, compares it, and makes decisions through logical inference. AI Mode particularly uses pairwise ranking to match passages and determine which is more suitable.

SEO Action: Your content must be clear, concise, and logically consistent. Simply providing "information" is no longer enough; you need to present that information persuasively.

Personalization

Using data like user history, location, and interests, AI creates personalised content responses. AI Mode performs this personalisation much more deeply.

SEO Action: The same content should be able to produce meaningful variations for different user profiles. Content architecture should be designed to adapt to different user contexts.

Generate-First Approach: Answer First, Then Source

Another notable feature of AI Overviews is the generate-first approach—generating the answer first, then searching for supporting sources. This necessitates designing your content as an "evidence-providing structure."

SEO Action: Your content should be reliable and structured to fill in the gaps under AI-generated responses.

There's a Gap Between Traditional SEO and the New Era

Technical SEO, links, and keywords are still important—but now they're just a "starting point." Real success will be measured by whether your content appears in AI responses.

New Success Metrics:

• AI citations instead of page rankings

• Information contribution instead of clicks

• Contribution to response completeness instead of backlinks

What Does This Paradigm Shift Require?

We must redefine SEO as "Relevance Engineering."

Our new content strategy should centre on:

• Semantic comprehensiveness and contextual richness

• Passage-level clarity and consistency

• Modular content addressing different user profiles

• Citation earning, reliability, and information authority

What to Do Now:

Transform your content to align with AI's semantic fan-out matrix. Structure your pages as "information synthesising" entities rather than just "information providing" ones. Create content variations considering user profiles. Design content with fragmentable, supporting passages suitable for generating-first logic. Evaluate success beyond classic metrics, focusing on appearing in AI responses and earning citations.

Google Updates Event and Recipe Schemas

Google made critical updates to event and recipe schemas on June 5, 2025.

For SEO professionals using structured data, this isn't just a document revision; it's a significant signal change that could affect search visibility.

Key Highlights:

Online Events No Longer Supported: Google has completely removed online event features from "event" structured data.

Physical Location Requirement: Google now only supports events that the general public can attend and are held at physical locations.

New Examples Added: The document was updated with examples of which events are appropriate/inappropriate.

Recipe Image Rule Clarified: The image property used in "Recipe" markup doesn't affect the image shown in SERPs.

What You Can Do:

Remove Online Event Schemas: If you're still defining online events with event schema, immediately clean up these markings.

Focus on Physical Events: Specify physical addresses and public reservation information for your local event pages.

For Recipe Content Sites: How images appear in SERPs is determined not by recipe schema but by classic image SEO techniques. Optimize factors like filename, alt text, and image dimensions.

Why This Matters for SEO Professionals

Google's seemingly small schema updates are actually silent harbingers of major algorithmic changes. Schema.org markups are the most direct way to tell search engines what your content is about in "clear language." For sites producing niche content like events or recipes, this could mean gaining or losing rich results.

Additionally, the clear clarification about the image element's ineffectiveness ends a long-standing misconception. Sites wanting to stand out with recipe images can no longer rely solely on markup; they must apply the golden rules of image optimization.

AI World This Week: Tools, Services, and Tips

• OpenAI acquired former Apple designer Jony Ive's AI hardware startup io for $6.5 billion. This acquisition is part of OpenAI's goal to develop consumer-focused AI hardware. I’ve will lead hardware and design efforts at OpenAI.

• Google began responding to financial searches through AI Mode with interactive charts. This feature is currently being tested in Labs environment but is part of Google's "answer-containing search" strategy. This development is both a warning and opportunity signal, especially for sites producing financial content.

• Google DeepMind is working on a new AI tool that will revolutionise email management. This tool will learn users' writing styles and automatically respond to routine emails. It's also designed to act as a shield against algorithms that distract users. Demis Hassabis notes that while such tools might lead to societal transformations in the long term, they aim to provide practical benefits in the short term.

• WordPress announced the formation of a special "AI Team" to accelerate AI integration into its core structure. Operating similarly to the Performance Team model, this new team will develop canonical plugins that users can test to help decide whether potential new features should be moved to the core. Strategic focus, rapid testing and deployment processes, and creating collaborative environments are among the main objectives. The team will include Google employees Felix Arntz and Pascal Birchler, who have made significant contributions to WordPress core. Arntz stands out as an experienced software engineer who previously led the Performance Team.

What Does This All Mean?

After 15 years in this industry, I've never seen changes this fundamental happen this quickly.

The shift from traditional SEO to Search Everywhere Optimisation isn't just about adding new platforms to your strategy. It's about fundamentally rethinking how discovery works in the digital age. When AI becomes the mediator between questions and answers, when social platforms become the new search engines, when personalisation reaches unprecedented depths, we need new frameworks, new metrics, and new ways of thinking about relevance.

The patent analysis of AI search models reveals something profound: we're moving from a world where machines tried to understand human language to one where machines actively participate in the conversation. They don't just find answers; they reason, synthesise, and personalise. Your content isn't just competing for rankings anymore; it's competing to be part of AI's reasoning process.

This transformation requires us to become more than SEO specialists. We need to become discovery architects, building bridges between brands and audiences across every channel where attention flows. The brands that understand this shift first, that invest in multi-platform thinking, that design content for AI consumption—these are the brands that will thrive in the search-everywhere world.

The future isn't about gaming algorithms. It's about genuinely serving users wherever they are, however they search, and whatever tools they use to make sense of the world.

The great search transformation is here. The question isn't whether you'll adapt—it's how quickly you'll evolve.

Until next week, keep optimizing everywhere.

Mert Erkal
Founder, Stradiji
AI-Driven SEO Leader

Would You Like to Support My Newsletter?

I love sharing the latest developments and strategies in the SEO world with you. If you find my content useful, you can support me by buying me a coffee. ☕ Click on 'Buy Me a Coffee' to contribute to knowledge sharing. Let's achieve more together!

© 2022-2025 SEOs Diners Club by Mert Erkal