The SEO, AIO, GEO, and AEO Roundup: Friday, September 25, 2026

I read Barry Schwartz' Search Engine Roundtable every day, plus Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and whatever is setting LinkedIn and X on fire, so you don't have to.

Two Weeks Notice

Google dropped the September 2026 spam update on Thursday around noon Eastern. It's the fourth spam update of the year. The last three wrapped in a day or two. This one takes up to two weeks, and John Mueller confirmed to Barry that the two weeks is no typo.

It's global, every language, and Google says it does not target link spam. The rankings chaos on the 23rd and 24th came before the announcement, so don't pin that on this update.

If a client drops between now and mid-October, go straight to Google's spam policies before you blame anything else. Tell them the truth about the timeline, too. Google says recovery takes months while SpamBrain relearns that a site has cleaned up its act.

Call Me Maybe

Local had a busy week.

1. Google Posts and phone numbers. Barry's headline calls it a crackdown on unverified contact information. Read the actual help document and you'll see Google loosened the rule. Phone numbers used to be banned from post content outright. Now verified numbers are allowed, and posts with unverified phone numbers, emails, or social handles get pulled. Hiroko Imai spotted it, and her advice is exactly right: keep contact info out of post copy entirely and let the CTA buttons do the work.
2. LSAs showing the wrong phone number. Since September 1, Anthony Higman has been yelling that Local Services Ads display the Google Business Profile number instead of the Google Ads call-tracking number. That held even with verified call assets set in GBP advanced settings. Google's explanation is that location assets override call assets. By the end of Barry's writeup, Higman says it's fixed. Fixed or not, every LSA account that ran from September 1 forward has call attribution you can't trust, so go audit it.
3. Garbage queries in your GBP searches breakdown. Joy Hawkins laid it out on X: your pin shows up when someone searches a nearby business, like the coffee shop next to Universal Studios. Performance Max branded map pins also log impressions beside unrelated businesses. Forward that thread to every client who emails you convinced their category is broken.
4. Four days to reject user edits. Per Barry's weekly video recap, Google Business Profile now gives owners four days to reject user-suggested edits. It will also email you when it detects a spike in spammy reviews. Four days is tight, so check your profiles at least twice a week.

Fan Out, Fan In

The nerdiest and most important story of the week is Roger Montti's writeup of R4T-Diffusion at Search Engine Journal. Query fan-out is what AI Mode does behind the curtain: it splits your one question into a bunch of sub-queries and retrieves answers for each.

Google trained an expensive reinforcement-learning model to fan out well. It then distilled that behavior into a tiny 53.9-million-parameter diffusion model that spits out every sub-query in one parallel pass. Google claims a 12 to 20 times speedup. The research paper came out in March, and the blog post landed September 15. Google hasn't said it's live. Montti reads the timing as a hint that it is, and so do I.

The reward function is the part that matters for AEO. It scores three things:

• Groundedness: every sub-query has to map to something real and retrievable.
• Diversity: broad coverage with zero synonym redundancy.
• Alignment: no drifting away from the original question.

Translate that into content strategy and you get this: every facet of a topic needs its own real, specific, retrievable answer on your site. Ten paraphrases of the same answer are exactly the redundancy this model is trained to throw away.

Also from AI land this week:

• Bing is testing renaming its Copilot tab "AI Mode", which means Microsoft is borrowing Google's name outright.
• Search Console added a multimodal filter to its performance reports.
• AI Overview links are reportedly pushing people deeper into AI Mode instead of out to your website.
• Google Discover is testing a "Dive deeper" feature that keeps readers on Google.

Do It Yourself

Donna Rougeau's 9 checks to audit your AI visibility without a paid tool is the most useful thing Search Engine Land published this week. It covers:

• robots.txt access for AI crawlers
• entity inventory
• specific, extractable phrasing
• sourced claims
• information gain
• JSON-LD depth with sameAs
• NAP consistency across Google, Bing, Apple, and Facebook
• Knowledge Graph and Wikidata presence
• asking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google what they know about you

She cites SOCi data showing ChatGPT recommends 1.2% of local businesses, compared with 35.9% visibility in Google's local 3-pack. If that doesn't scare a small business owner into fixing their citations, nothing will.

The other big piece, Leigh McKenzie's GEO guide, deserves more salt. Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. McKenzie runs growth at Backlinko, a Semrush brand. Semrush tool pitches pop up every few scrolls. And Search Engine Land's own author page lists the same guide under February 11, at the same 12:02 pm timestamp it carried on the 24th. It's a rerun. The one number worth keeping is Semrush's finding that 40% to 60% of cited sources change month to month across 2,500 tracked prompts.

Schema Corner

Google updated its video structured data documentation to support the creator and author properties in VideoObject. It also clarified which interaction types count in interactionStatistic. If you embed YouTube videos on your own site, add creator today. It's five minutes of work and one more entity signal tying your videos to you.

Paid Odds and Ends

• You can't edit Target ROAS while promotion mode is active in Google Ads. Google offers ROAS tolerance as the workaround.
• AdSense dropped its identity verification threshold to $0.
• Google Ads is running a six-month pilot for gun accessory ads in the US.
• ChatGPT Ads expanded to Southeast Asia and Taiwan.

Pass the Salt

Barry Adams took Chartbeat apart on LinkedIn over its claim that publishers' Google traffic is down 40% year over year. His point: Chartbeat counts every internal click as its own traffic source. If readers click around more on your site, Google's share of pageviews shrinks even when Google traffic hasn't moved at all. Absolute numbers tell the truth, and percentages of a polluted pie tell a story.

My favorite irony of the week: 404 Media reports that OpenAI fired contractors hired to train its AI for using AI to do it. Glenn Gabe and Barry had some fun with that one.

Hire Me

If your Google Business Profile got suspended, your calls stopped tracking, or ChatGPT has never heard of you, this is what I do all day. See my GBP reinstatement and management services and SEO services. Or just grab a 15-minute call, a 30-minute call, or a 60-minute call and let's sort it out.

See you next Friday.