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- 🔥 The SEOs Diners Club - Issue #191 - Weekly SEO Tips & News
🔥 The SEOs Diners Club - Issue #191 - Weekly SEO Tips & News
By Mert Erkal, SEO Strategist & Conversion Expert with 15+ years of experience
The digital marketing world continues its relentless evolution, and this week, we're turning our gaze toward 2026. Search engines are no longer just machines that rank links—they've transformed into intelligent assistants that converse with us and deliver summaries. At the heart of this transformation lies a new concept: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).
In this issue, I'm diving deep into how we need to fundamentally reshape our search strategies, exploring AI's dance with content and e-commerce, and sharing what we can do to stay ahead in this new order. If you're ready, let's embark on a journey into the future.
Meet GEO: Search Is No Longer a Single Destination
This week's eye-opening article published in Search Engine Land, planning for GEO in 2026, serves as a wake-up call for digital marketers. We're now in an era where we need to ask not just "what are people searching for?" but "where are they searching?"
The numbers are striking: Google still reigns supreme, processing 417 billion searches per month. But here's the fascinating part—ChatGPT alone processes 72 billion messages monthly. Moreover, users under 44 are searching across an average of five different platforms. They seek inspiration on TikTok, read real user experiences on Reddit, ask questions to ChatGPT, and then conduct detailed research on Google. This fragmented discovery journey presents both a threat and a tremendous opportunity for brands.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) enters the scene precisely at this juncture. This isn't just a new tactic—it's a mindset shift that reshapes how we think about search, content, and customer discovery. The goal is no longer simply to rank first on Google, but to be present wherever users are, in the format they prefer, and with the voice they trust.
Understanding the User Journey: From "What" to "Where"
The article recommends building our strategy on four fundamental pillars. The first is following the user. This requires deep, layered, and behavior-driven audience research. By combining surveys, social listening, focus groups, and analytics, we must answer these questions:
Where is our audience searching?
What are they trying to accomplish?
What motivates them in that moment?
We need to map these answers against four core human search motivations:
Fact-finding: Users seeking rational, objective answers.
Crowd-sourcing: Users wanting validation from peers and communities.
Taste-tuning: Users seeking inspiration that fits their identity.
Habit-driven: Users relying on shortcuts based on trust and familiarity.
If your budget planning doesn't start with this understanding, you're essentially building a strategy in the dark.
Rethinking Ranking: Conquering the Search Real Estate
The second pillar is rethinking ranking. The SEO industry has rightfully focused on AI Overviews, but many brands are missing the bigger picture. Search real estate has never been more diverse: images, sitelinks, video carousels, reviews, forum answers, shopping links, and AI-powered responses are all competing for attention.
We need to move beyond thinking about ranking and focus on occupying the spaces where our audience actively seeks reassurance, answers, or inspiration. Here's a simple content format framework:
Shape Perspectives: Opinion-led, expert content. For a mindset that's curious, reflective, exploring ideas. Brand opportunity: Build thought leadership and spark category conversations. Format examples: Opinion pieces, newsletters, blogs (X, Medium, Threads).
Inspire and Engage: Short-form and visual, emotionally resonant content. For those seeking emotion, identity, and connection, often through entertainment. Brand opportunity: Build affinity through authentic, visual storytelling. Format examples: Short videos, UGC, reels (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts).
Inform and Reassure: Long-form, detail-rich content. For a mindset seeking facts, clarity, and confidence before deciding. Brand opportunity: Build trust with expertise and transparency. Format examples: Guides, FAQs, whitepapers (Google, Bing, specialist AI tools).
Simplify and Empower: Explainer and how-to formats. For a mindset wanting practical help and easy steps to act. Brand opportunity: Remove friction with visual learning and demonstration. Format examples: How-tos, demos, webinars (YouTube, LinkedIn Live).
Your GEO budget should be allocated across all these content types, not just to rank but to show up where your audience is looking in the format that suits their mindset.
The third pillar is building entity authority. In a GEO-led world, your brand needs to be understood, not just crawled. Large language models (LLMs) don't see your brand the way a search engine does. They need structured clarity to learn who you are, what you do, and why you're credible.
This means treating your business as an entity:
Brand: Who you are and what you stand for.
People: Your team, their expertise and experiences.
Products: The solutions you offer and their features.
Expertise: Your knowledge base and competencies in your field.
Processes: How you work and how you make decisions.
Yes, most businesses already have some of these assets: author bios, about pages, product descriptions, awards. But they're often fragmented or buried. Here's the behavioral point: humans (and machines) trust logic they can see.
Your internal recommendation engine? Your customer support process? Your buying guide? If any of this logic lives in code or internal tools but never gets surfaced, LLMs and users can't trust what they don't understand. So make your decision-making visible:
Use "How we choose" content.
Add explainer videos or structured markup.
Link related resources in a way that mimics how your business and team think, not just how your website flows.
Create transparent, traceable journeys that allow both users and machines to understand your brand's logic, not just your pages.
Investing in Trust and Credibility: Put E-E-A-T at the Center
The fourth and final pillar is investing in trust and credibility. We're not in the game of chasing algorithms. We're in the business of earning trust, and GEO makes that more important than ever. In 2026, E-E-A-T isn't going anywhere. It needs to be your strategic cornerstone.
That means your budget should include:
Always-on Digital PR: Fresh mentions and citations in high-authority sources.
Data Storytelling: Reports, whitepapers, research built to be referenced.
Customer Review Strategies: Reputation, sentiment, and response management.
Awards and Accreditations: Third-party trust signals.
Behavioral Insight: To frame your messaging in line with audience values.
Your digital PR strategy should be mapped like this:
45% always-on commentary and seasonal hooks
30% evergreen assets that build over time
20% integration with on-site content and schema
5% experimentation (multimedia, partnerships, AI-native formats)
Every campaign should answer the question: What would my audience type into Google, or ask an assistant, and would this be the answer they'd trust? If the answer is yes, you're building GEO-ready content.
Thinking About the Messenger: Who's Speaking?
Once you know what to say and where to say it, the final piece of the trust puzzle is who says it. It's not enough to understand where to show up and what to say. You also need to think about who has the best voice.
There's a behavioral bias known as the messenger effect: humans evaluate information based on the source. This offers a huge opportunity when we consider who should say what for our brand.
There are four key voices to consider:
Brand: Your voice - What you stand for and want to be remembered for.
UGC: Their voice - What your audience is saying and sharing about you.
Influencer: A trusted voice - People who add credibility and humanize your brand story.
Media: An amplified voice - Platforms and publications that extend your reach and authority.
Planning this early in your strategy will ensure you have the budget available to get this part right, alongside all the other activities you need to cover.
Google's "Goldmine" System Leaked: Behind the Curtain of Title and Snippet Selection
The leak of Google's internal systems has opened the door to a new era in the SEO world. Hobo Web founder Shaun Anderson's detailed analysis revealed a previously undisclosed quality evaluation system codenamed "Goldmine." This system determines how titles and snippets displayed in search results are selected, and the findings demand a fundamental shift in our SEO strategies.
What Is Goldmine and How Does It Work?
Goldmine, technically named "AlternativeTitlesAnnotator," is a sophisticated scoring engine Google uses to select the title and description text displayed in search results. The system's foundational philosophy is surprising: The <title> tag provided by publishers is not treated as a trustworthy source. Instead, it's evaluated as just one candidate among many.
Goldmine sources title candidates from:
HTML <title> tag: The primary candidate, but not the only option.
Heading tags (<h1>, <h2>): Special weight is given to the main <h1> heading.
Internal and external link anchor text: Both on-site links and backlink anchor text from external sites can become title candidates.
Google-generated titles: When all other signals are deemed low quality, Google algorithmically generates its own title.
The Three-Stage Evaluation Process
Goldmine puts title candidates through a three-stage process:
Candidate Sourcing: Various title candidates are gathered from the sources mentioned above.
AI Editor (BlockBERT): Candidates are evaluated by BlockBERT, an advanced language model, for semantic coherence, contextual relevance, and natural language quality. This stage goes beyond simple keyword matching and easily detects tactics like spam and keyword stuffing.
Real User Behavior (NavBoost): The final and most decisive stage relies on real user click data through the NavBoost system. The system analyzes 13 months of user behavior, measuring these signals:
• goodClicks: Clicks with long dwell time, indicating valuable content
• badClicks: Clicks followed by quick returns, signaling dissatisfaction
• lastLongestClicks: The strongest positive signal, where users end their search journey
The Penalty Mechanism: How Bad Titles Impact Rankings
Goldmine doesn't just find the best candidate—it actively identifies and penalizes bad ones. The system flags these errors with specific penalty markers:
• dupTokens: Keyword repetition (keyword stuffing)
• goldmineHasBoilerplateInTitle: Use of boilerplate text
• isTruncated: Titles that are too long
These penalties work in two stages:
Direct SERP Penalty: The low-quality title candidate's score is reduced, and a better candidate (such as the <h1> tag) is selected instead.
Indirect Ranking Impact: The replacement title is subjected to a live A/B test with real users. The performance of this new title (whether it gets good or bad clicks) feeds into the NavBoost system and can directly impact page rankings.
Critical Takeaways for SEO Strategy
1.Engineer Signal Coherence: The <title> tag, <h1> heading, URL, meta description, introductory paragraph, and internal link anchor text must all send a consistent, harmonized message. This eliminates algorithmic ambiguity.
2.Visual Prominence Is a Measured Signal: The leaked documentation reveals the existence of an avgTermWeight attribute, which measures the average font size of terms on the page. This means making your headings and key phrases visually stand out is a quantifiable signal.
3.Optimize for the "Satisfied Click": Your SERP snippet should make a precise and accurate promise, and your page content should immediately and comprehensively deliver on that promise. The goal is to end the user's search journey on your page (lastLongestClicks).
4.Technical Precision Is Non-Negotiable: Eliminate keyword repetition, enforce uniqueness across pages, and strictly manage title lengths. Technical rules are enforced with direct scoring demotions.
User Satisfaction Is the Only Sustainable Strategy
The complexity and interconnectedness of systems like Goldmine make them impossible to "trick." As Shaun Anderson emphasizes, the only sustainable strategy in modern SEO is to focus entirely on satisfying user intent. As AI systems become increasingly sophisticated, we must use our uniquely human skills—empathy, strategic thinking, and clear communication—to create the unambiguous signals of quality that Google's specialized AI systems are designed to find and reward.
Critical Announcement from Google: What Content Wins in AI Overviews?
As AI reshapes search and e-commerce, data and developments in this space illuminate our strategies. In a significant report published in Search Engine Journal, Google's VP of Search Liz Reid explains the characteristics of content that gets the most clicks in AI Overviews.
Reid's statements are crystal clear: People want content with a "human perspective." Users are looking for that sense of "what's the unique thing you bring to it?" The content people click on in AI Overviews is richer and deeper. Surface-level AI-generated content isn't wanted because when users click on it, they don't actually learn much more than they previously got. They don't trust the result anymore.
With AI Overviews, Google surfaces deeper, richer content and reduces what they call "bounce clicks." A bounce click is when you click on a site, realize "I didn't want that," and go back. AI Overviews provides some content, then surfaces deeper, richer content, and they'll continue to do that over time to really get that creator content, not AI-generated.
Reid also notes that Google has extended the concept of spam. Now spam isn't just spam in the classic sense, but also low-value content that doesn't add very much, content that tells you what everybody else knows. On the other hand, Google is giving more ranking weight to content from someone who really went in and brought their perspective or expertise, put real time and craft into the work.
What do these statements tell us? Originality and genuine expertise are critical for ranking well, particularly in AI Overviews. Using software that analyzes what competitors have already done or employing a "skyscraper/10x content" strategy sets you up for doing exactly the opposite of what Liz Reid recommends. A creator will never express a unique insight by echoing what a competitor has already done.
ChatGPT Now Works Like a Search Engine
Another piece of data showing how much AI-powered search has grown comes from a recent Nectiv study. ChatGPT performs a search in 31% of prompts, new data reveals. Moreover, these searches average 5.48 words in length—roughly 60% longer than typical Google searches. 77% of queries are five words or longer.
ChatGPT averages 2.17 searches per prompt and can max out at four. The most searched sector is local search (59%), while the least searched are credit cards (18%) and fashion (19%). The most common search terms include "reviews" (702 instances), "2025," "features," and "comparison."
What does this mean? ChatGPT isn't just answering questions—it's searching like a power user. The model relies on longer, more specific, and more commercial-style queries than Google's average searcher. This means SEOs could have more influence over ChatGPT's answers, especially for local, product, and buying-intent searches where the model leans most heavily on external data.
The New Playing Field in E-commerce: ChatGPT Shopping and the Rise of Feeds
ChatGPT's shopping features are also a significant part of this new playing field. OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and the addition of structured merchant feeds directly into ChatGPT is changing how products are discovered and purchased in conversational search.
While Google relies on crawling, links, and page-level signals, ChatGPT takes a different approach: the feed isn't just another signal. It's the primary authority on your brand and products. Price, stock, and product attributes—all supplied by you—directly shape visibility. Your data is now both the input and the signal of differentiation.
You should treat the feed as a strategic marketing asset, not just a technical requirement. Success depends on how completely and clearly your data reflects what buyers ask for in natural conversation with ChatGPT.
The ChatGPT Product Feed Specification requires merchants to supply structured product data via TSV, CSV, XML, or JSON files, refreshed as often as every 15 minutes. Required attributes include: Product ID, title, description, price, availability, weight, merchant identity, and main image.
But the real strategy lies in the optional fields:
Performance Signals: Popularity score, return rate, product review count, average rating. In Google, reviews sit outside the feed. In ChatGPT, you can include them in the feed.
Rich Media: Video and 3D models. These new signals can boost visibility inside conversational flows.
Custom Variants: Beyond color and size, you can define unique attributes that match intent-heavy queries (e.g., "mahogany desk, 48 inches wide" or "snapback cap in navy").
Geo Targeting: Region-specific pricing and availability can be built into the feed.
These optional fields will separate the winners from the pack. Early adopters who invest in them will gain more visibility and trust in ChatGPT conversations.
Wikipedia's Traffic Loss: The Real Impact of AI Summaries
A development that concretely shows the impact of AI-powered search summaries comes from Wikipedia. According to the Wikimedia Foundation's announcement, human pageviews fell 8% year-over-year. Why? AI search summaries and social video platforms.
Search engines are using generative AI to provide answers directly to searchers rather than linking to sites like Wikipedia. Younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web. While Wikipedia welcomes new ways for people to gain knowledge, this shift presents risks.
Fewer visits may mean fewer volunteers grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work. People are becoming less aware of where their information actually comes from. Therefore, Wikipedia argues that AI, search, and social companies using content from Wikipedia "must encourage more visitors" to the website itself.
This situation serves as a warning for all content creators. AI summaries can cause traffic loss, and we need to face this reality and prepare our clients for this possibility.
AI vs. Human: The Hybrid Model Wins
While all these technological developments unfold, the value of the "human" factor is increasing even more. A video I watched reveals how giants like Tesla, IBM, and Klarna experienced disappointment when trying to completely replace employees with AI.
Tesla's "machine that builds the machine" project failed. Klarna experienced serious problems in customer service. Service disruptions, production errors, and inefficiency left 55% of companies that replaced their employees with AI regretting their decision. The result? Many companies are quietly rehiring human employees.
This reminds us once again that AI is a tool to complement and empower human capabilities, not to replace them. AI use under human supervision is more effective. The hybrid model both increases efficiency and maintains employee satisfaction.
Google Expands Ads in AI Overviews
Finally, Google announced it will expand ads within AI Overviews beyond the U.S. to select English-speaking markets by the end of 2025. Ads will appear directly alongside AI summaries rather than traditional text results.
For advertisers, this is both an opportunity and a challenge. Gaining visibility in AI answers can drive richer engagement, but it will require new strategies for discovery and intent optimization in a more conversational search environment.
3. Actionable SEO Tips
This week's most important takeaway: Depth and expertise are more valuable than ever. As Google has stated, content filled with superficial and copy-paste information will lose in the visibility battle. So, how do we create "richer and deeper" content?
Tip 1: Don't just tell what you do, explain how and why you do it. For example, on a service page, don't just list the services you offer. Show what processes you follow when delivering that service, what standards you adopt, your team's expertise and experience in this area with concrete examples. Include customer success stories, case studies, and transparent reports.
Tip 2: Make your decision-making processes visible. Create content like "How we choose," "Why we recommend this product," "How our quality control process works." This approach adds the "experience" and "expertise" layers that Google is looking for to your content, moving you one step ahead in both AI Overviews and traditional search results.
Tip 3: If you have an e-commerce site, don't limit your product feeds to just required fields. Explore ways to integrate customer reviews, product popularity, videos, and custom variants into your feeds. Build a data infrastructure that can explain in full detail why your product is the best choice when a user asks about a product on platforms like ChatGPT.
Tip 4: Develop a multi-platform strategy. Identify where your audience searches and create content suitable for each platform's format. Short videos for TikTok, long-form articles for LinkedIn, participation in authentic discussions on Reddit, structured and deep content for ChatGPT.
Closing & Strategic Call
As you can see from this week's notes, the ground of digital marketing is shifting, and the name of this new ground is GEO. Brands that can accompany users on their fragmented and multi-platform discovery journeys, not only providing information but also building trust, will be the winners of the future. This process is as exciting as it is daunting, full of opportunities.
2026 is no longer far away. You need to plan now how to adapt your search strategy to this new era, how to become more visible in AI-powered search engines, and how to strengthen your entity authority. Remember, a winner-takes-all dynamic is at play: brands with the most web mentions, producing the deepest content, and sharing the most transparent processes will stand out.
If you're curious about what path your brand should take in this transformation and want to create an SEO and content strategy suited for the AI age, the Stradiji team is ready to guide you over a coffee. We can shape the future together.
See you in next week's notes!
Best,
Mert Erkal
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