SEO & Social News Round-Up for June 2023

Digital SEO   /  Jul 10, 2023

Here is a quick roundup of SEO news for June.

Google News

• This month Google made enhancements to featured snippets, with Google Search now displaying multiple featured snippets on the desktop. This tweak reinforces the importance of well-structured content. 
• Google has also undertaken major quality updates and given a significant speed boost to its Search Generative Experience (SGE) to assist users with researching places like restaurants, hotels or tourist attractions. 
• There have also been improvements to prominence reporting in Google Search Console as the “could not determine the prominent video on the page” reason for a video not being indexed has now been broken down into more specific reasons – which sounds like it would be great for debugging video indexing – but in reality, there is often no good answer. 
• This month’s bad news for Google: the European Commission has filed a formal antitrust complaint against Google’s ad business due to “abuse of dominant market position in digital advertising.” Google has disagreed, of course, and is arguing that digital advertising is a highly competitive industry. 
• And, of course, the big news this month is that Universal Analytics was sunsetted on July 1st and is now only available for historical reporting with no new data being processed. So, moving forward, all reports will be based on the latest analytics – GA4. 

Bing News

• Microsoft announced in June that it would soon bring Bing Chat to all browsers; it is currently only available with Microsoft Edge. No timeframe has been announced for this roll-out. 

AI News

• OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has introduced updates to its APU, GPT-3.5 Turbo, and GPT-4 models following developer feedback. These updates aim to provide developers with more capability to create AI applications to help them with some of the most common tasks in the workplace environment. 
• Mark Zuckerberg, MD of Meta, announced this month that generative AI is coming to “every single one of our products” with planned features, including AI agents for Messenger and WhatsApp. Meta is also working on generative AI photo editing for Instagram and post creation tools for Facebook and advertisers. 
• The EU has taken another big step towards agreeing on an AI rulebook with new amendments to the AI Act. These amendments include a ban on remote biometric surveillance, untargeted scraping of facial images, emotional recognition by law enforcement and extensive social media platforms prohibited, and predictive policing.

Social News

• Twitter’s US ad sales plunged 59% in June as challenges continue. Advertisers are spooked by hate speech, pornography, online gambling and marijuana-related ads on the platform.  
• Meta also announced they would launch a Twitter competitor with the code name: Project 92. Not much is known about it, apart from the fact that it will be a standalone app based on Instagram. 

Other Tech News

• Apple announced the launch of their next-generation AR headset, “Vision Pro”, with intuitive input and multitasking capabilities with eye-tracked pinches. 

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