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Google will soon be updating the helpful content system to better recognize and reward personal experience. In this episode, I share my thoughts after testing out several ChatGPT plugins. Web browsing is fascinating!

In the coming weeks, when you search for something that might benefit from the experiences of others, you may see a Perspectives filter appear at the top of search results. Tap the filter, and you’ll exclusively see long- and short-form videos, images and written posts that…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 10, 2023

The helpful content system will be working to identify and show more 'hidden gems' on Search, along with still working to ensure unhelpful content is not performing well. More on the hidden gems aspect is on our recent blog post: https://t.co/QlDczQA9NH pic.twitter.com/JLMwzZ8jGz

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 15, 2023

I touched on this briefly last week as we discussed Google’s blog post on perspectives. Perspectives, like featured snippets showing different people’s opinions or views on a topic, have existed in News results, but soon will be shown for non-news queries as well. The new update will help find “hidden gems” amongst more well known sites. 

I expect that this is something we will see rewarded a lot alongside AI generated answers in the SGE (Search Generative Experience). If users turn to websites for an answer, it will be because they are looking for something that only a human can give them – in most cases, a demonstration of real life experience on a topic.

Google tells us they will be updating the helpful content system soon to that “more deeply understands content created from a personal or expert point of view”. It may come from a comment in a forum thread, a post on a little-known blog, or an article with unique expertise on a topic.

I encourage you to think outside the box when it comes to demonstrating experience. Ask yourself whether the content on your pages is content that could essentially be answered by AI. Keep in mind that the accuracy and the ability to show images and video will continue to improve. 

If so, then in order for Google to still send traffic to your website, unless you have a strong enough brand that people are continuing to seek you out for information, you will need to demonstrate your experience in ways that convince a searcher it’s worth a click.

I anticipate Google will display websites with things like:

• a video showing you reviewing and using a product
• content that has verbiage that indicates first hand use. For real though. I don’t think a made up paragraph falsely proclaiming experience will do much
• content from a creator who is known online for talking on their topics
• content that answers questions AI can’t such as advice based on real time information and insight on your industry and its products or happenings.

Examples:

• A realtor could create a video showing each of the neighbourhoods they service and describing what they and their clients find great about each one. 
• An accountant could create content that answers the most common questions they’ve had about 2023 taxes that people can’t find the answer to online.
• A store that sells gear or equipment for a particular hobby can create instructional videos on using it, or better yet, content that answers the questions that their audience has that AI cannot answer well.
• A product review website could set up fun real world experiments never been done before. Instead of an article on the top 5 recommended meat thermometers (because that kind of thing can be gleaned from info in the shopping graph which means AI can generate a good answer), make a video where you take the top 5 brands and put them through actual tests to measure their accuracy, ease of use, and so on.
• A blogger who writes reviews of travel opportunities can add all sorts of first hand experience by sharing real life photos and video of their experiences. Better yet is if that blogger’s audience is re-sharing and engaging with them. I’m not saying social signals are a direct ranking factor. But it makes sense to me that being mentioned around the web in multiple contexts, including having a large social presence, is something that could feed into Google’s knowledge and shopping graphs.

This type of content takes time, money and ingenuity to produce. Gone are the days where we could outsource and scale content creation and then build links to try and get Google to consider it worth ranking. 

Note: I expect some will argue with me here as there currently are many examples of sites with AI generated content ranking well. My bet is that the upcoming experience update to the helpful content system will fix this problem. When I analyze these pages, one thing is clear – they do a really good job of answering searcher’s questions. When Google is looking for a page that quickly meets searcher intent, these AI generated answers often do well. If you see a page ranking above you that you think is AI generated, take note on how the page and language are crafted to meet user intent. If you can do something similar and combine it with your real-world E-E-A-T, you have the potential to outrank them. 

More reading:

The New Google Changes Are Good for Affiliates (Not Bad) – Article by Adam Riemer with thoughts on demonstrating experience.

Google is changing up search. What does that mean for publishers? (NiemanLab). There are some good points made in the tweets shared near the end of the article. One points out how informational queries like, “What time is the Super Bowl” currently drive clicks that pay the bills in many newsrooms. I believe that newsrooms will still exist. But so many organizations that publish “news” rarely publish anything substantially original or valuable when placed alongside all the other options searchers have for reading that story.

In case you missed it last week, I’d recommend reading Google’s guide to the Search Generative Experience that is coming soon: “A new way to search with generative AI”.

Here is a discussion Jon Cooper invited me to where a few of us discuss our thoughts on the SGE (The Search Generative Experience where Google will show AI answers to searchers) and its impact on our industry. I thoroughly enjoyed this. Jon describes the SGE and his concerns for the first 17 mins. It is worthwhile watching this part. Then the discussion starts. 

Here’s the transcript.

I spent some time on Twitter sharing my thoughts on how certain businesses are likely to be impacted by Google’s introduction of AI to the search page.

This one made me think. Google's shopping graph likely contains that kind of information.
https://t.co/GmQz74V4gn

If that's the case, then the AI generated answer can probably answer any query about the price of medication. I can't find any information about coupons in the… pic.twitter.com/easo3DLpkI

— Dr. Marie Haynes🌱 (@Marie_Haynes) May 19, 2023

For most informational queries, AI will likely answer those. However, Google has said that SGE will be held to a higher standard for YMYL topics, so it will be interesting to see how people change how they ask questions.

You may find content opportunities by knowing what… pic.twitter.com/jeeeqfiGrP

— Dr. Marie Haynes🌱 (@Marie_Haynes) May 19, 2023

People will likely start using a much more conversational search. Instead of searching for keywords I can picture people searching for their specific situation.

"I just ran my car into my neighbor's Corvette…"

Look what GPT-4 just gave me (see the image).

Users will be able… pic.twitter.com/LVVqzPMEAf

— Dr. Marie Haynes🌱 (@Marie_Haynes) May 19, 2023

I expect there will be a lot of change in how people use the internet for recipes.

My experience with GPT4 and recipes has been incredible.

The recipe in the image below isn't scraped from websites but rather pieced together because the language model is incredibly good at… pic.twitter.com/IgY8LycUmb

— Dr. Marie Haynes🌱 (@Marie_Haynes) May 19, 2023

Everyone who is a ChatGPT Plus user should have access to plugins now. If you do not, go to settings and turn on Beta and you should see them. 

I have been playing with these a lot. (You can read more in the subscriber section on specific ways I’ve tried using them so far.) They are extremely buggy and often don’t work. But when they do, you can do some interesting things with them. I believe we should pay attention to these and be constantly testing, not to see what they fail at, but rather, to see what they can do to help us do better work. I expect these plugins are foreshadowing for what we will soon see once businesses start using Google’s generative AI toolset.

There are current 11 pages of plugins available.

There are 11 pages of plugins: text to speech, financial market data, ask your PDF, sports team info (oh boy, fantasy football is going to change), create and edit diagrams, AI powered forms and quizzes, send daily text messages, world news, learn a language, Spotify playlist! pic.twitter.com/Xg70vGthBQ

— Dr. Marie Haynes🌱 (@Marie_Haynes) May 17, 2023

You can have several installed at a time and ChatGPT knows when to call on them. For example, if you want statistics, it will call on Wolfram:

The Show Me plugin makes charts and graphs. I have been playing with it to analyze traffic data, but have not had success as of yet in creating something super valuable.

As I review client sites I will be looking for ways to test these plugins out more thoroughly. 

Web browsing plugin

This plugin is fascinating. Again, it’s buggy and often fails. It knows when to draw on the web for live information to help improve an answer. 

In the subscriber content, I’ve shared some example searches I did. It is interesting to see which pages the browser chooses to crawl and show to searchers. I want to keep studying this as this will become a question SEOs are often asked – How does a business get recommended by an AI chatbot?

While the plugins are fun to play with for now, soon we will start seeing helpful use cases. I am keeping a close eye on these because I think what people are doing with ChatGPT plugins will be foreshadowing to what businesses will build with Google’s AI toolset. I absolutely cannot wait to see what my readers will do with Google’s AI tools.

There has been significant turbulence in rankings this week:

Google Search Algorithm Ranking Volatility Around May 17 (Unconfirmed)

The Semrush sensor was quite high over the weekend, indicating plenty of changes in rankings:

I expect Google is doing further preparation to get ready for AI generated answers. I have not of yet analyzed sites impacted at this time. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Perspectives (experience) update is live soon.

Information from Google on bulk export of data from GSC.

Tips from Google on SEO best practices for news sites.

Here is a great video with Callum Scott discussing your brand and the knowledge graph.

Possible crawl issues for AMP pages?

I'm noticing a rise in 'Crawl issue' errors for AMP, completely unrelated domains, so I believe it's some issue with Google Search Console.

Is anyone else experiencing this?
cc: @JohnMu @danielwaisberg pic.twitter.com/kqCD3ovEPm

— Lino Uruñuela (@Errioxa) May 17, 2023

Wondering if this means non-US based crawling might become more common again?

Anyone seen either yet? pic.twitter.com/JUtOn9y7Gi

— Oliver H.G. Mason 📉 (@ohgm) May 19, 2023

If currencies are off slightly in GA4 it may be because GA4 converts transaction values from your local currency to USD and then back again.

There is something weird going on with the way Google displays titles in the SERPS. I have seen a few people tweeting some odd results.

WTAF is going on with Google right now… these are all on "page 1" for my query. pic.twitter.com/kxa855lI9n

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) May 17, 2023

This is page one of Google for me today. Something is broken. 👀 @clairecarlile (sorry for typo in your name 😅) @searchliaison saw @lilyraynyc highlighting a lot of "untitled" bits too? pic.twitter.com/PuqfDgDjvr

— Mark Williams-Cook = 🅼🅰🆁🅺 🅲🅾🅾🅺 (@thetafferboy) May 18, 2023

SERP Changes

Google is showing a new carousel for outdoor attractions:

🆕 Google is now showing a carousel of outdoor attractions, museums, top experiences, beaches etc on the search results page with overlays that provide more information about each location. This is new visual experience, near to SGE.
🧵 pic.twitter.com/kw00zAZT9y

— Khushal Bherwani (@b4k_khushal) May 14, 2023

I’ve seen Google showing more and more pricing information in the SERPs.

🆕 G now shows price lable on image thumbnail, which we used to see price on product detail page.#ecommerce #seo pic.twitter.com/emBQygT6hE

— Khushal Bherwani (@b4k_khushal) May 14, 2023

Google is testing showing products in 3d in the SERPS. 

Sam Altman spoke with Congress re regulating AI. This is a long video, but well worth the watch to understand the potential risks and concerns of AI:

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that the companies who make AI should be the ones to set boundaries. “There’s no way a non-industry person can understand what’s possible.” Then the government can put a regulatory structure around those.

ChatGPT now has an iOS app. Here’s more info from OpenAI’s blog.

Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features using a model called Codey.

Google released Duet AI to a limited number of users. It uses AI to provide code recommendations and chat assistance.

Bard is doing more now to link to websites as sources. However, I have heard several reports that the urls it provides can be made up and nonexistent.

Bard is now better at concise summaries. Note: I’m not sure what the text limit is for Bard, but I find I can paste a full article in and ask for a summary and it does a good job most of the time. I pasted in Google’s information on Perspectives and asked for a very brief  summary. I thought this was quite good. 

While Bard can do some limited web browsing, I have found I am much less likely to get a hallucination if I copy and paste content directly into Bard for now rather than giving it a url and asking it to summarize. I think sometimes, if it can’t crawl the url it makes up an answer based solely on the words in the url.

Apple has restricted employees from using ChatGPT. It is reportedly developing its own AI language tech. I have heard other companies share concern that if employees are using ChatGPT to debug code, they could be divulging company secrets. 

Twitter sent a letter to Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft accusing Bing of improperly using their data. Twitter is a valuable resource for any AI LLM as it is often a source of breaking news and of what experts or a community are saying. GPT-4, for example is only trained on data up till 2021. Being able to use an LLM alongside Twitter’s real time data makes any AI tool more useful. The first time I used Bing to ask what it knew about me, it told me all about my recent tweets on whatever subject I asked. Today, it answers based on information from my website or other news sources, but not Twitter. We have spoken before about how Twitter purchased hardware that is likely going to be used to create its own language model/AI capabilities. This should be an interesting topic to monitor.

NYC schools are lifting their ban on ChatGPT. They are now “ready to embrace AI in the classroom.” 

Here’s good information from Google on large language models:

Google’s PaLM 2 uses nearly 5x more text data for training than PaLM. It’s trained on 3.6 trillion tokens – strings of words. LaMDA (what Bard previously used) was trained on 1.5 trillion tokens. PaLM2 uses a new technique called compute-optimal scaling which makes it more efficient with overall better performance. 

Here’s a NYT article on how Meta (Facebook)’s Open Source LLM LLaMA is being used by many. In February Meta openly released LLaMA to academics and government researchers to build their own chatbots. 

Tesla’s AI robots can now walk, memorize patterns and perform simple tasks.

There are possibly fewer queries returning local maps packs.

Google Business Profiles now give us more options when it comes to displaying the languages your business can service.

People are seeing the Services tab being shown prominently:

👀 “Services” as the first action button on a search in Google Maps – even more prominent than the call, website and directions CTAs. Google wants you to give searchers the answers in the search results. Don’t sleep on optimizing Services! pic.twitter.com/KqfAQsbamW

— Allie Margeson (@SeoAllie) May 17, 2023

There may be an increase in problems with reviews disappearing.

Joy Hawkins on how to set up your GBP in 2023.

Microsoft is developing new solutions for ads. Menachem Ani shared a message he received that says, “If you’re using AdSense, you can place our ads in the same units, and we’ll ensure only the highest paying ad goes live.” I expect that the whole online ecosystem of ads will change with AI. 

Google is deleting old Gmail accounts not used in two years. You can keep your account active by reading or sending an email, using Google Drive, watching a YT video, downloading an app on the play store, using Google search or signing in with Google on a third party service. Google does not have plans to delete accounts with YouTube videos.

Montana passed a law banning TikTok from the state as of January 1. This would not punish individuals, but would make TikTok liable for $10,000 per day for making the app available in app stores like Google and Apple.

A new study shows that it is not possible as of yet to reliably detect if text is AI generated.

BBC Verify is a new brand created to address the growing threat of disinformation online.

Music prompt you can try: Give me three unusual questions and then choose an album or playlist.

An example showing using ChatGPT to create a mockup for web design.

Fascinating things being done with AI for Image and video:

at first glance, DragGAN looks like a regular old Warp tool, but then you start using it to rotate a subject and you realise it's something much more powerful — drag and click image manipulation, courtesy of AI https://t.co/Qm1rg79KNK pic.twitter.com/paUiJrTcP6

— James Vincent (@jjvincent) May 19, 2023

Another mindblowing demo.

Photo manipulation at an unbelievably Godly level.

If you drag the part you want to change, GAN will manipulate it instantly.pic.twitter.com/VvyDyQi7Og

— Barsee 🐶 (@heyBarsee) May 19, 2023

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