As we enter the holiday season, October’s data reveals significant shifts and stabilization across industries in AI Overviews (AIOs). Critical insights from October reveal growth in certain sectors, stability in others, and strategic changes in content types and sources. These insights offer actionable strategies for marketers aiming to optimize for AIOs during this critical period. … Read more
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search is struggling to accurately cite news publishers, according to a study by Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. The report found frequent misquotes and incorrect attributions, raising concerns among publishers about brand visibility and control over their content. Additionally, the findings challenge OpenAI’s commitment to responsible AI development in journalism. Background … Read more
Google’s Daniel Waisberg and Omri Weisman share three tips for improving both online and offline marketing strategies. They explain how to leverage Google Trends search data to make better decisions about products, optimize strategies, understand consumer behavior, and focus marketing efforts for a higher ROI. Google offers three tips: How To Benchmark Against Competitors Analyzing … Read more
Study reveals Google’s cautious approach to AI-generated content in sensitive search results, varying across health, finance, legal, and political topics. Google shows AI Overviews for 50% of YMYL topics, with legal queries triggering them most often. Health and finance AI Overviews frequently include disclaimers urging users to consult professionals. Google avoids generating AI Overviews for … Read more
Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about image alt text and SEO, offering a comprehensive explanation of why alt text is important and why using AI for automatically creating alt text may be inadequate. Alt Text The person asking the question wanted to know whether alt text was still relevant for search optimization. … Read more
WooCommerce survey offers insights into the strategies that online retailers are using to prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) and why it’s important to be proactive. Online Sales Is Most Important Sales Channel One of the important takeaways from the survey is that 76% of respondents confirmed that their online sales are the … Read more
Google published a video tutorial with seven tips for using Google Trends to research and share keyword and topic data. The tutorial shows how to find hidden filters and search tools in the Trends interface and explains how they help identify actionable data. The seven ways to explore and share are: Punctuation By Language Comparison … Read more
Aleyda Solis recently published the results of her SEOFOMO survey that revealed actionable facts about where SEOs are getting their clients, what kinds of clients they’re getting and how they’re promoting themselves to get more clients. Aleyda Solis (LinkedIn) is a popular digital marketer specializing in International SEO. She publishes the SEOFOMO + MarketingFOMO Newsletters, … Read more
Google’s Martin Splitt answered a question about malicious bots that impact site performance, offering suggestions every SEO and site owner should know and put into action. Malicious Bots Are An SEO Problem Many SEOs who do site audits commonly overlook security and bot traffic as part of their audits because it’s not widely understood by … Read more
Google significantly revamped its documentation about ranking pages that contain video content. While the changelog lists three areas that changed, a review of the content provides a case study of four considerations for digital marketers and publishers when refreshing content to improve relevance for site visitors—and Google. What Changed The documentation that was updated relates … Read more
In an interview published on YouTube, Google’s Gary Illyes offered advice on what small sites should consider doing if they want to compete against Reddit, Amazon and other big brand websites. About Big Brand Dominance Google’s Gary Illyes answered questions about SEO back in May that went underreported so I’m correcting that oversight this month. … Read more
It has become quiet around AI Overviews. One month after my initial traffic impact analysis, I updated my data for AIOs. The results are important for anyone who aims for organic traffic from Google as we’re seeing a shift in AIO structures. Shortly after Google just launched AI Overviews on May 14, I looked at 1,675 … Read more
Google published a case study that shows how using structured data and following best practices improved discoverability and brought more search traffic. The case study was about the use of Video structured data but the insights shared are applicable across a range of content types. The new case study is about an Indonesian publisher called … Read more
WordPress security scanner WPScan’s 2024 WordPress vulnerability report calls attention to WordPress vulnerability trends and suggests the kinds of things website publishers (and SEOs) should be looking out for. Some of the key findings from the report were that just over 20% of vulnerabilities were rated as high or critical level threats, with medium severity … Read more
A recent report shows that while Gen Z increasingly turns to social media platforms for information searches, Google remains the primary starting point for a significant portion of this age group. The data published by Axios shows that 46% of internet users aged 18-24 begin their online queries on Google, compared to 58% of those … Read more
Researchers discovered a way to defeat the safety guardrails in GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo, unlocking the ability to generate harmful and toxic content, essentially beating a large language model with another large language model. The researchers discovered that the use of tree-of-thought (ToT)reasoning to repeat and refine a line of attack was useful for jailbreaking another … Read more
Artificial intelligence (AI) may offer solutions to reduce activity on social media that is seen as toxic and polarizing. In a recent study, researchers suggest that tweaking how social networks surface content could reduce partisan divisions and lead to more positive interactions. The study was conducted by a team led by University of Amsterdam professor … Read more
Despite the hype around artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT, most Americans remain unfamiliar and don’t anticipate it to impact their jobs, A recent analysis from the Pew Research Center found that 18% of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, though awareness is higher. Here’s a closer look at the survey results conducted in July 2023. ChatGPT … Read more
