The State of SEO and AEO This Week
Google retired FAQ rich results and Ahrefs published the first rigorous study disproving the schema-only AEO playbook. Here is what actually changed in the last seven days, and where to put your attention.
Chad Kubik
Director of Sales & Marketing, Rooster Grin Media · 7 min read
The biggest SEO and AEO news this week is that Google retired FAQ rich results on May 7, and Ahrefs published the first rigorous study showing schema markup does not increase AI citations the way the industry has been claiming. For dental and orthodontic practices working with Rooster Grin Media, the takeaway is simple: the schema-only AEO playbook is dead, and the practices that win in AI search now are the ones doing answer-first content, entity consistency, and review velocity.
What changed this week
Google killed FAQ rich results on May 7. Back in 2023, Google limited the FAQ rich result feature to government and health sites. As of last week, even those sites lost it. The feature is fully retired.
Ahrefs published the first rigorous study on schema and AI citations on May 11. They tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD schema markup between August 2025 and March 2026, compared against 4,000 control pages. The results: Google AI Mode +2.4%, ChatGPT +2.2%, Google AI Overviews -4.6%. The first two numbers are statistically indistinguishable from zero. The third is significant and points in the opposite direction from the one the AEO industry has been promising for two years.
Google added another ranking volatility spike mid-week. Search Engine Roundtable flagged it on May 14. Tool chatter and ranking movement both went up sharply.
Google updated its spam policies on May 15 to clarify that the policies now also apply to Google's AI-generated responses in Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode.
That is a lot to digest in one week. Here is the part that matters.
The bigger shift
For 18 months, the dominant story in our industry has been: “Ship schema, win AI search.” Vendors quoted stats like “+44% citations” and “+3.2x AI visibility” with no traceable sources. Those numbers were always blog-citing-blog. The first real study with a dataset, a control group, and published numbers just disconfirmed them.
This does not mean schema is dead. It means schema was oversold.
Schema is still a valid standard. Google explicitly stated in May 2026 that leaving it causes no penalty. Bing and Copilot still use it. Schema clarifies content for machines that would otherwise have to guess. And for local healthcare, schema still drives the things that actually convert (knowledge panels, review stars, map results).
Where to put your attention
Here is what is actually moving the needle in May 2026.
Answer-first intros on every page
Forty-four percent of LLM citations come from the first thirty percent of a page's text. Most practice websites still open with a welcome paragraph that says nothing. Rewrite your treatment and location pages so the first two sentences answer the implied question and name the practice and the city.
Entity consistency
Your practice name, doctor name, city, and core services should appear in the same words across every page, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and your social profiles. AI engines compress trust. If you're inconsistent, you lose to a practice that isn't.
Freshness as a hard filter
Pages older than six months are losing citation likelihood across nearly every industry. Updating treatment pages, doctor bios, and location pages on a quarterly cadence is now baseline maintenance, not a nice-to-have.
Schema, but the right kinds
Drop the "FAQ schema on everything" strategy. Prioritize Dentist, MedicalBusiness, LocalBusiness, Person, Service, and Review schema. These still drive rich results, knowledge panels, and star ratings, which still drive clicks.
Off-site mentions and review velocity
Brand mentions across the web are now one of the strongest signals for AI citation. Earned media, podcast mentions, YouTube, directory consistency, and review velocity (reviews in the last 30 to 90 days) matter more than ever.
Position one still matters more than ever
A page at SERP position one has a 33% chance of being cited in AI Overviews. Position ten drops to 13%. The 60% decline between top three and bottom of page one is brutal. Traditional SEO is still the foundation — AI search rewards the same authority signals.
What this looks like by the numbers
Google still owns roughly 80% of global search volume. ChatGPT and the other AI platforms drive less than 1% of total web traffic. So the story is not “abandon Google for AI.”
The story is that Google itself is becoming AI-first. AI Overviews now appear in about 18% of searches and 57% of long-tail queries. When an AI Overview appears, organic click-through rate drops 61%. When Google's full AI Mode is active, the zero-click rate hits 93%.
For healthcare specifically, AI Overviews show up in 88% of medical queries. The top three positions in healthcare lost a combined 6.55 percentage points of CTR in Q2 2025. Google is using its own AI to cannibalize its own organic results.
That is the real shift. It is not “AI replaced Google.” It is “Google is now an answer engine first and a link engine second.”
What we are doing about it at Rooster Grin
This change is good for practices that want to do the work and bad for practices that want shortcuts. We are doing five things differently right now:
- 1 Rewriting treatment page intros to answer-first format on all SEO and AI Search clients.
- 2 Auditing entity consistency across every client's site, GBP, and citations.
- 3 Shifting schema priorities away from FAQ and toward Dentist, LocalBusiness, Person, Service, and Review.
- 4 Building quarterly content refresh cadences into every package so freshness is baseline.
- 5 Doubling down on review generation and earned media for clients who want top-of-funnel AI visibility.
If you're working with us already, your account manager will be reaching out about which of these apply to your practice. If you're not, and you'd like to see what an audit against this new reality looks like for your site, grab a time on my calendar.
This is a good week for practices that want to win on substance. The shortcuts are dying. The work is what wins.
Chad Kubik
Chad Kubik is Director of Sales and Marketing at Rooster Grin Media and a dental industry marketing strategist with 20 years of experience. He spent 15 years as a regional consultant at Patterson Dental and has worked with hundreds of dental and orthodontic practices across the country.
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