🐹 Hamsterdam Part 147: Weekly SEO/GEO News Recap (9/26 to 10/2, 2026)
By Ethan Lazuk
Last updated:
A weekly look-back at SEO/GEO news, tips, and other content shared on social media & beyond.
Opening notes, thoughts, and musings:
- My website is now eligible as a Preferred Source in Google. I’d be grateful if you added me!
- Welcome to another week of Hamsterdam! 🐹 If you’re new here, this is a weekly summary of hand-curated SEO/GEO news and tips shared on social media. Like a newsletter, but different.
- Curious what I’ve been up to? Check out my latest blog posts from the past week:
- Summarizing “Query Implied Generative Engine Optimization”: A Hamsterdam Research Post
- Evaluating “The Fellowship of the Query: Learning Retrieval Actions” for SEO/GEO Insights: A Hamsterdam Research Post
- Why Do GEO Visibility Scores Change When You Run the Same Prompt More than Once? A Tales from the Query Post
- “It’s Not What You Say – It’s What Others Say About You” (A Hamsterdam History Lesson)
- Let’s Talk About “Category Entry Points” in the Context of SEO/GEO: A Hamsterdam Marketing Lesson
- Google Quality Rater Guidelines Lowest Quality Page “Beneficial Purpose” Explained. A Tales from the Query Post
- I appreciate you being here and look forward to sharing the week’s SEO/GEO news below! 🙌
If you’re in a rush, hop down to the news portion. 📰
Or continue reading for two vocabulary lessons plus an introduction.
And we’re off …
🧑💻 Marketing word of the week: “Consideration set”
A consideration set is the relatively small group of brands, products, or options that a person seriously thinks about when deciding what to buy.
For example, someone shopping for SEO tools might know several different brands, but when they’re actually ready to buy, their consideration set might be Ahrefs, Semrush, and Screaming Frog.
There’s an important distinction here with awareness. Awareness is the knowledge that a brand exists, while consideration set means they see the brand as a realistic option.
Consideration set connects nicely to mental availability, which helps a brand come to mind in a buying situation. Essentially, getting into the consideration set means the brand survives the initial recall and becomes one of the options the buyer actually evaluates.
🤖 AI word of the week: “Hubness”
Hubness is a phenomenon in high-dimensional embedding spaces where certain data points become the “nearest neighbor” of an unusually large number of other points, even when they aren’t especially relevant to all of them. (In other words, some embeddings become hubs that keep showing up in retrieval results.)
This concept is surprisingly relevant to SEO/GEO because modern semantic search and retrieval systems often rely on embeddings and nearest-neighbor matching. Hubness can potentially distort retrieval by causing certain documents, passages, or concepts to appear relevant to lots of different queries simply because of the geometry of the embedding space (not necessarily because they are the best answer).
This invites an interesting question, which is whether some content can be retrieved more often not only because it’s relevant, but because of where its representation sits in the embedding space. That opens up a great discussion point about the difference between semantic relevance and vector similarity.
✌️Introduction to week 147: “Originality”
Google updated it’s helpful content documentation with new sections on Main Content and quality raters:
I’ve written extensively about that helpful content document, so now I’ll probably have to update my article.
But the part I want to focus on is the quality raters section, where it discusses “Originality.” A lot of people are focusing on the “Effort” section, and that’s good too, but I believe, since LLMs probabilistically summarize existing knowledge, that having original information in your content is a powerful way to distinguish its value.
That doesn’t mean going against common consensus for the sake of it. (That may actually hurt your visibility chances.) But rather, I’d recommend summarizing the common consensus and then adding a new viewpoint in addition to that.
Originality is something LLMs can’t really accomplish by design. Lean into it.
Thank you for supporting Hamsterdam and the cause of SEO/GEO learning. 🙏
Enjoy the vibes:
Missed last week? Don’t worry, I got you! Read Part 146 to catch up.
🌟 Other great sources of weekly SEO/GEO news:
- The SEO Weekly – Garret Sussman, iPullRank
- SEOFOMO – Aleyda Solis
- Weekly Video Recaps – Barry Schwartz, SER
- Weekly SEO News YouTube channel – Olga Zarr, Seosly
- Niche Surfer – Yoyao Hsueh
- Core Updates – Mark Williams-Cook, Candour Agency Ltd.
Time for our weekly review of SEO/GEO social posts, articles, & more …
Now, let’s step inside the white flags of Hamsterdam …
⏩ Jump to a section:
- News, Google updates, & SERP tests
- SEO tips & tidbits
- Fundamentals & resources
- Articles, videos & case studies
- Local SEO
- Technical SEO
- Content marketing
- Local SEO
- Data analysis & reporting
- AI, LLMS, & machine learning
- Miscellaneous & general posts
Or keep scrolling to see it all. ⏬
📰 SEO/GEO news, Google updates, SERP tests & notable posts
Notable updates or news related to Google Search or related SEO topics.
🍟 SEO tips & tidbits
Actionable tips, cool tidbits, and other snackable findings and observations that can be teaching moments.
Essential information, concepts, or resources to learn about SEO or AI.
Longer-form content pieces shared on social, in newsletters, and elsewhere.
🧑💻 Technical SEO
Everything from basics to advanced moves (and also tools).
✍️ Content marketing
From what is helpful content to user journeys and beyond.
📍 Local SEO/GEO
From Google Business Profiles to reviews and more!
📊 Data analysis & reporting
Showing that what you’re doing is helping.
🤖 AI, machine learning, & LLMs
News related to models, papers, and companies.
🤔 General marketing & miscellaneous
This is for great content that isn’t necessarily SEO/GEO specific.
Let’s connect!
Hit me up anytime via text or call at 813-557-9745 or on social or email:
Cheers! ✌️
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