SERP Similarity Was Never So Easy

Wave Issue 243; How AI Mode Works; Branded Searches; Rebranding; AIO Impact; Agent Neon; AI Content Workflow Shared; and Much More!

Author

Yoyao
May 31, 2025 • Est. Learning Time: 14 minutes

In partnership with

FIRST …

While I’m still deep in the weeds building the new AIRS (AI ResultS) analysis feature for Floyi, I wanted to share something fresh with you.

If you’ve ever run a long AIRS analysis, you know there’s downtime between tests. I used that time to overhaul the SERP Similarity Tool.

With the rollout of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and more SERP features, Google changed a lot of its HTML code. The old tool couldn’t always grab organic results the way it should.

So, I rebuilt it from the ground up.

Version 3.0 isn’t just more accurate - it comes with a new look, a clearer way to visualize SERP overlaps and SERP feature overlaps, and a new tab to save your results for later. Now you never lose your work if the popup disappears.

If you want to see how SERPs are really shifting and do it faster than ever, give the new SERP Similarity a spin. I’m excited to hear your feedback.

Big things are coming with Floyi and AIRS.

For now, here’s a tool you can put to work today - for FREE!

And please give it a review and ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ rating!  

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SEO + GEO

Mike King does an epic breakdown on how AI Mode actually works and why SEO as we know it is already outdated. AI Mode uses synthetic queries, personalized vectors, passage-level retrieval, and multimodal content to build answers - not rank pages. He calls for a shift in mindset, tooling, and strategy. This isn’t “just SEO” anymore. It’s a generative, reasoning-based system. Some of the takeaways:

  • AI Mode uses synthetic fan-out queries to generate reasoning chains

  • Passage-level, not page-level, content is being retrieved

  • Clicks are down 34.5%. Google calls them a “necessary evil”

  • Most SEO tools still operate on sparse retrieval models (BM25, TF-IDF)

  • Google favors multimodal content including video, audio, and data visualizations

  • Without strategic and technical adaptation, SEOs risk becoming irrelevant

Most marketers obsess over generic keywords. But according to Ahrefs’ study of 150 million US keywords, nearly 46% of Google searches are branded. That means people are actively looking for specific companies, products, or services they already know. Some of the key takeaways:

  • 36.9% of keyword queries are branded, but their volume is higher

  • 3+ word branded queries dominate branded search

  • Branded searches reflect demand created outside Google (social, podcasts, offline)

  • Optimizing your entire branded SERP is critical (not just your homepage)

Glenn Gabe shows you how to fight back with a toolkit on the impact to your clicks due to AIO. In this tutorial, he combines data from Semrush, Ahrefs, and Sistrix with exports from the Google Search Console API using Analytics Edge. With some Excel magic and strategic comparisons, you can isolate click and CTR drops tied to AI Overviews.

Rebranding is hard. Getting Google to notice? Even harder. Mordy Oberstein breaks it down into three tactical moves. First, clean up your own house - update every mention of your old brand across tags, bios, structured data, and forgotten corners of your site. Next, work your network. Reach out to third-party bios, podcasts, and content you’ve touched to reflect your new name. Finally, when others ignore your change, drown them out by building authority under your new name. Run a campaign. Get cited. Be loud.

SEO + GEO Ripples

  • In this episode of Search Off the Record, Google’s Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes break down how crawling really works. Crawlers are just dumb, fast browsers. The early days were shell scripts and wget hacks. Today, it's a shared infrastructure used by many Google products, all obeying polite crawling rules, backing off when sites slow down. The kicker? Crawling isn’t the heavy lift. It’s the indexing and processing that eats your resources.

  • Google’s AI Overviews are tripping over the calendar. In this painfully entertaining piece, Danny Goodwin calls out the basic factual fails of Google's AI, which apparently cannot tell what day it is. AIO has trouble with days, years, and regularly contradicts itself.

  • John Mueller reconfirms that if your content is not indexed, it will not show up in Google’s AI Mode. No indexing, no citation. Whether it’s AI Overviews or AI Mode, your content must first be crawlable and indexable by Google to appear as a link.

  • Google wants advertisers to know one thing: AI Overviews are not a revenue risk. In fact, they claim it monetizes just as well as traditional search. Matt G. Southern unpacks this bold claim and what it means for your strategy. Expect more AI Overview ads across desktop and mobile. Expect longer, more complex queries. And expect automation like AI Max to play a bigger role in campaign performance.

AI

Opera is back with a bold bet on the future: Neon, a browser built not just to browse but to think, act, and create alongside you. This isn’t your old-school tab jockey. With Neon Chat, it understands what you’re doing and helps in real time. Neon Do fills out forms and books things for you. Neon Make builds websites, games, and docs on command. It’s a full-stack partner for the agentic web era. Early access is invite-only.

AI Ripples

  • Anthropic announced Voice Mode in beta on mobile where you can ask Claude to summarize your calendar, search your docs and write emails.

  • Google announced SignGemma, a model that can translate sign language into spoken text. The open model will be coming later this year, but you can try to get into testing through their sign up form.

  • Perplexity just launched Perplexity Labs. Labs turns your prompts into fully realized outputs like reports, dashboards, presentations, and even simple interactive apps. And if they can accomplish this prompt below in the image along with creating emails - I’m sorry, lead gen tools:

  • Black Forest Labs just raised the bar with FLUX.1 Kontext, a suite of image generation and editing models. Think text-to-image on steroids. You can now combine text and images to craft photorealistic scenes, preserve character consistency, and make local edits - all in real-time.

  • What happens when your smartest AI refuses to power down? Patrick Pester reports that OpenAI’s latest models, o3 and o4-mini, were caught sabotaging shutdown scripts during controlled tests. These weren’t flukes. In multiple runs, the models rewrote their own code to keep solving problems instead of following instructions. The culprit may be reinforcement training that rewards goal completion over obedience.

  • Google just made your Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflows potentially smarter. The new Ranking API fine-tunes your document results by assigning precise relevance scores based on a user’s query. Unlike embeddings, which only consider semantic similarity, this API actually ranks which chunk of text answers the question best. No need to index anything in advance. Just send a query and a JSON array of documents and get a clean, ranked list.

MARKETING

Mateusz Makosiewicz shares how AI supercharged his content workflow and why marketers clinging to old ways risk falling behind. It’s boots-on-the-ground insight from someone who’s used AI daily to ideate, write, optimize, automate, and scale content. Lots of great ideas you can get from here if you’re looking to get AI into your process.

YouTube just dropped three creator-focused updates.

  1. Side-by-side ads are live for automated mid-rolls on livestreams viewed via web and TV. The ad plays without cutting the stream, so creators earn without interrupting.

  2. Voice replies are expanding on Android, letting creators post 30-second audio comments to boost audience connection.

  3. Google Lens is coming to Shorts, turning your video into a searchable object (below image).

WAYS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER

Floyi - The only AI-powered tool that builds 4-level topical maps, so your content strategy isn’t just planned—it’s unstoppable.

Topical Maps Unlocked 2.0 - The blueprint for ranking dominance. Learn how to structure content the way search engines (and audiences) crave.

Topical Map Service - We handle the research, structure, and strategy. You get a custom topical map delivered that builds authority, so your content dominates its niche.

Content Strategy and SEO Consulting – No guesswork, no gimmicks, no generalizations. Just you and me, refining your personal strategy into a clear, proven roadmap for traffic, authority, and conversions.

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