SEO & Social News Round-Up for January 2023

Digital SEO   /  Feb 6, 2023

Google took a bit of a break after Christmas, and it was a quiet month on the SEO front – but there was quite a lot of a buzz around Artificial Intelligence (AI) this month.

Google News.

• The buzz around Open AI’s ChatGPT AI chatbot has put the wind-up Google, who have suddenly ramped up their focus on their AI-powered chatbot features. They are also set to unveil more than 20 more projects powered by AI, including an app for testing product prototypes and an image generation studio that “creates and edits images”.
• Bankrate, the American consumer finance company, hit the news as they were very open about using AI to write most of their content. This led to Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liasion, responding on Twitter and saying: “As said before when asked about AI, content created primarily for search engine rankings, however, it is done, is against our guidelines. If the content is helpful & created for people first, that’s not an issue.” Just reiterating that Google wants people to write content for other people to read, but you can use AI to help with ideas for the content and to help you pad out those ideas.
• One of the first AI tools Google has launched is eCommerce related, including a personalized search and browsing experience for eCommerce sites, an AI-powered solution for checking in-store shelves, an AI-driven product recommendation system and a tool that uses machine learning to arrange products on the website.

Bing News

• Rather than trying to go down the route of competing with ChatGPT like Google have, Microsoft is rumoured to be working with the company to add some of Open AI’s ChatGPT features to Bing Search in the coming months. So, instead of seeing a list of links as a response to a search query, you could see humanlike text answers to questions. This news could impact searcher behaviour, so we will be watching what happens closely. 

Social Media News

• Meta (the company that used to be known as Facebook) has been fined 390 million euros after European Union regulators ruled that it had been illegally forcing users to accept personalized ads. Meta has three months to respond with how it will comply with the ruling, but if it decides to allow users to opt out of sharing their data, this could put its ad revenue at risk – and may mean targeting changes for Meta advertisers.
• Revenue at Twitter is reportedly down 40% year-on-year, due no doubt to ongoing concerns about new chief Elon Musk’s updates and the broader downturn in digital advertising. This could potentially lead to it being shut down if things don’t get back on an even footing. Again, one to watch closely. 

Other Industry News

• Google and Meta’s advertising market share continues to drop, while smaller companies like Netflix, TikTok and Amazon are increasing. People are spending less time online on sites like Meta and have also suffered from Apple’s iOS14 update, where many users declined to be tracked. 
• Apple is set to launch more detailed business listings with a new web portal, “Apple Business Connect“, to better compete with Google. 
• An ex-employee of the search engine Yandex apparently leaked their repository containing files that listed more than 200 search ranking factors. While Yandex is no Google, it is interesting information for us to know from the point of view of helping to understand better how search engines work. 

Array