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It should be no surprise that, again, much of this month’s news is AI related. It is what everyone is talking about. It is important to reiterate that it is very early on in the AI journey for SEO, and there isn’t a lot we can do with it at the moment, but it is so overwhelmingly being talked about at the moment that it would be remiss of us not to mention it.
Google News
- Google carried on reacting to the current popularity of ChatGPT. There was an announcement that they are now supercharging their AI efforts, making it a top priority. As part of this focus, they have now reintroduced Larry Page and Sergey Brin to advise them on the way forward, they are planning on launching a bunch of AI-related products (about 20 this year) focusing on ethics and responsibility, and they are introducing chatbot features into the search results. It is still very early in the AI journey for SEO with questions such as how Google can monetise a chatbot answering a question, as most of their revenue comes from people seeing an advert and clicking on it still needs to be answered.
- Big news for Google this month also was a prominent antitrust case brought against them by the US Justice Department and eight states. This case aims to reduce the power of Google Ad Manager by asking them to make it cheaper and a better solution for smaller companies. They have made a lot of allegations around Google’s apparent illegal monopolisation of the online advertising market, and worth keeping an eye on as it might shake up SEO.
Bing News
- Bing will launch ChatGPT features as part of their Search in the next few months. It is likely to be a live chat question-and-answer assistant-type product.
Social Media News
- Despite TikTok’s colossal growth in popularity, with it being the number one search engine of choice for many millennials, it is also facing a potential ban in the US due to its possible connection to the Chinese government.
- Twitter is still losing a lot of money – its revenue is currently down 40% yearly.
Industry and Tech News
- Sistrix, the SEO rank tracking and analysis platform, recently released its report on the industry winners in the US for 2022 relating to which domains grew the most. The exciting thing about this was the sites that did the best were the ones that produced original content, did the research, and “owned” the factual information or who added value or were the very last click in the user’s journey.
- Apple has launched Apple Business Connect, meaning you can now update and manage your business information on the Apple platform, such as opening hours, special offers, etc. One for us to explore if we run a local SEO campaign for you.
- The big news of the month was that the entire source code for Yandex was leaked, including their search engine – and the information included all about how their 17,000 ranking factors work. We can learn what might matter, but it won’t change SEO strategies as it contains nothing we aren’t already doing.
SEO & Social News Round-Up for February 2023
Digital SEO / Mar 3, 2023
It should be no surprise that, again, much of this month’s news is AI related. It is what everyone is talking about. It is important to reiterate that it is very early on in the AI journey for SEO, and there isn’t a lot we can do with it at the moment, but it is so overwhelmingly being talked about at the moment that it would be remiss of us not to mention it.
Google News
- Google carried on reacting to the current popularity of ChatGPT. There was an announcement that they are now supercharging their AI efforts, making it a top priority. As part of this focus, they have now reintroduced Larry Page and Sergey Brin to advise them on the way forward, they are planning on launching a bunch of AI-related products (about 20 this year) focusing on ethics and responsibility, and they are introducing chatbot features into the search results. It is still very early in the AI journey for SEO with questions such as how Google can monetise a chatbot answering a question, as most of their revenue comes from people seeing an advert and clicking on it still needs to be answered.
- Big news for Google this month also was a prominent antitrust case brought against them by the US Justice Department and eight states. This case aims to reduce the power of Google Ad Manager by asking them to make it cheaper and a better solution for smaller companies. They have made a lot of allegations around Google’s apparent illegal monopolisation of the online advertising market, and worth keeping an eye on as it might shake up SEO.
Bing News
- Bing will launch ChatGPT features as part of their Search in the next few months. It is likely to be a live chat question-and-answer assistant-type product.
Social Media News
- Despite TikTok’s colossal growth in popularity, with it being the number one search engine of choice for many millennials, it is also facing a potential ban in the US due to its possible connection to the Chinese government.
- Twitter is still losing a lot of money – its revenue is currently down 40% yearly.
Industry and Tech News
- Sistrix, the SEO rank tracking and analysis platform, recently released its report on the industry winners in the US for 2022 relating to which domains grew the most. The exciting thing about this was the sites that did the best were the ones that produced original content, did the research, and “owned” the factual information or who added value or were the very last click in the user’s journey.
- Apple has launched Apple Business Connect, meaning you can now update and manage your business information on the Apple platform, such as opening hours, special offers, etc. One for us to explore if we run a local SEO campaign for you.
- The big news of the month was that the entire source code for Yandex was leaked, including their search engine – and the information included all about how their 17,000 ranking factors work. We can learn what might matter, but it won’t change SEO strategies as it contains nothing we aren’t already doing.
Written by Lou 
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