Welcome to the February 2023 edition of the Marketing Miner newsletter, where we bring you the latest and most important SEO news you need to know to stay ahead of the game.
Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing
In early February, Microsoft unveiled a new version of Bing. Since then, its new AI chatbot has made headlines for its advanced capabilities and memorable outbursts. The new Bing lets you ask the AI chatbot questions and get detailed, human-like answers with footnotes linking to original sources. Chatbot can also help with daily SEO tasks and more.
The biggest difference between Bing and ChatGPT is that Bing's AI Chatbot can access the web, while ChatGPT cannot. Having access to the web in real time is a big advantage over ChatGPT.
Microsoft's Bing chatbot is running on a next-generation OpenAI large-scale language model that has been customized specifically for search, and it allows users to ask for contextual information based on that model. So far, 71% of searchers have given a thumbs up to the new search AI experience. What do you think, can the new Bing dethrone Google?
Bard and new AI features in Google Search
Google announced an artificial intelligence chatbot technology called Bard that will begin rolling out on Google Search soon. It has been specifically launched with the intention of competing with the popular language model ChatGPT-3, developed by Open AI.
Bard will work exactly like ChatGPT, meaning users will be able to interact with the chatbot through conversation. AI capabilities in Search can distill information into easy-to-digest formats to help you see the big picture when you are looking for insights. To provide fresh, high-quality answers, Bard pulls information directly from the web.
While ChatGPT and Bard may be tasked with writing codes, essays, or poems, Google Search is still a search engine at heart. Its primary role is to connect users to information on third-party sites, not to generate answers (or at least for now).
What will AI search features mean for SEO? With Google's new AI features, users may no longer need to visit multiple sites to get a well-rounded answer to their questions. This could also potentially increase the volume of zero-click searches. It's too early to tell exactly how all these updates will affect SEO. It is unlikely that AI will replace the entire industry, although it will change the way SEO is done.
Image source: Google.com
Is AI content against Google Search's guidelines?
Google has reiterated and clarified some of its advice about AI-generated content amid all the buzz about generative AI in search. Google does not care who writes your content, as long as it is written to help people and not to manipulate search results. What you should be focusing on is not how the content is created, but rather whether the content is created to help people, and not primarily to rank in the search engines.
When it comes to automatically generated content, our guidance has been consistent for years. Using automation—including AI—to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies.
. This said, it's important to recognize that not all use of automation, including AI generation, is spam. Automation has long been used to generate helpful content, such as sports scores, weather forecasts, and transcripts. AI has the ability to power new levels of expression and creativity, and to serve as a critical tool to help people create great content for the web.
Learn more about how AI-generated content fits into Google Search's guidance.
Want to know how Marketing Miner can improve your online presence? Try our Profilers to see our tool in action!
Google Updates
Google announced many changes coming to Google Search, Google Lens, Google Maps, and Google Translate in a live stream from Paris in early February.
What's new?
Multisearch
- People now use Google Lens more than 10 billion times a month.
- Multisearch is now available globally on mobile in all languages and countries where Lens is available. We should see this option on the web in the next few months too.
- “Multisearch Near Me”, which helps users find local businesses, will also become available globally in the coming months.
- Google will also continue to roll out new features like shopping and step-by-step homework help.
- Immersive view is a whole new way to explore a place. It makes you feel like you're there before you've even visited the city. The feature is now expanding to even more cities.
- Search with Live View leverages AI and AR to help you find things around you (e.g. ATMs, restaurants, parks, or transit stops) without having to pick up your phone while you're out and about. In the coming months, this feature will be available in Barcelona, Madrid and Dublin.
- Indoor live view is coming to over 1,000 new airports, train stations, and malls in cities over the next few months.
- Glanceable directions by viewing your route overview or lock screen. Even if you decide to take a different route, Google Maps will automatically update your journey. This feature includes information such as estimated arrival times and your next turn details without having to go into the Google app. This feature will be available in the coming months for Android and iOS devices.
- Google also introduced new features for EV riders who have Google integrated into their car. For example, you can quickly find fast chargers that charge over 150 kilowatts, check if locations have EV chargers, or add stops along the way to charge your EV.
Google Translate
- Translation and AR with a more seamless translation experience is now rolling out globally. With this new update, searchers will be able to translate text in more complex contexts.
- New contextual translation options provide richer, more contextual translations for single words, short phrases, and phrases that have more than one meaning.
- We can also look forward to a new app design for Android coming soon, with an easier-to-read screen, more accessible features, and new gestures to help navigate through the most common and recent translations.
February 2023 Product Reviews Update rollout globally
On February 21, 2023, Google released the February 2023 product reviews update for these languages globally:
English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Polish.
The product review system is designed to better reward high-quality product reviews - content that provides insightful analysis and original research and is written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well. The rollout may take up to two weeks to complete.
What's New in Lighthouse 10
Lighthouse 10 brings a brand new performance audit and a few changes along with the removal of the Time to Interactive metric. TTI's 10% score weight how shifts to Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which now accounts for 25% of the overall performance score.
There are now also new insights on bfcache (back/forward cache). The bfcache is one of the most powerful tools available to improve a page's performance for real users. This new Lighthouse audit navigates away from the test page and back again to test if it's bfcacheable, and lists the reasons if it fails.
SEO reads
Google: Don't use 403s or 404s for rate limiting
Over the past few months, Google has noticed an uptick in site owners and some content delivery networks (CDNs) using 404 and other 4xx (but not 429) client errors to try to reduce Googlebot's crawl rate. In this post, you will learn why 4xx errors are bad for Googlebot's rate-limiting, and how to reduce Googlebot's crawl rate the right way.
How to block ChatGPT from using your website content
There is concern that there is no easy way to opt-out from having your content used to train large language models such as ChatGPT. There is a way to do this, but it's not easy and there are no guarantees that it will work. Learn how to block your content from being used as AI training data.
The Role of AI Content in SEO
Should you include artificial intelligence in your SEO strategy? And when should you avoid it? Using AI correctly is just one part of a data-driven strategy. In this article, Lily Ray answers some of the most pressing questions website owners have about whether using AI-generated content is in line with Google's policies, or whether it could potentially prevent a violation that could lead to penalties or ranking drops.
Google Bard AI – What sites were used to train it?
Google's Bard AI is trained using website content, but very little is known about what content it uses. Want to know what websites are being used to train this advanced language model? This article reveals more information about Google's Infiniset dataset.
I have full access to Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing. Here’s what it’s like for SEO
Brodie Clark decided to test Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing to review it from a user's and an SEO professional's perspective, along with some general thoughts on its usefulness. He also compared it to ChatGPT, Old Bing, Current Google, and Bard.
Marketing Miner news
Marketing Miner launched a new Hungarian database!
In Profilers, you can now analyze any keyword or website data for the Hungarian market too. At the moment, our database contains more than 400 million of the most popular keywords with search volume higher than 10. All data is updated daily and we are still adding new keywords every day. Do you want to know more about how our Profilers work? Try it now and see for yourself!
We have also launched an improved and faster version of the Keyword Categorization tool in Reports, which is now also available for PL and HU markets! Thanks to this update, keyword research in Marketing Miner is now even easier and faster than before.
Updated Marketing Plan
Do you know the Marketing Plan feature in Projects? With so many recent changes, we have updated all of its tasks and links to make sure everything is up to date.
This hidden gem is more than just a marketing checklist, as it provides you with a complex SEO strategy that is based on best practices. You can use it as a step-by-step SEO strategy based on best practices to take your project to the next level. Basically, this is the marketing foundation that you can go through, apply to your web project, and then check off the tasks that you have completed.
New update in Data Extractors
We know that managing many accounts can be overwhelming. That's why we've now combined Account + Property into one field, with a new search function in the select box to make it easier to filter data in Data Extractors. If you want to learn how to export data from Google Analytics and Search Console without limits, check our useful guide to Data Extractors here.
