Bard can watch YouTube videos, Amazon has a new AI chatbot, & ChatGPT celebrates its first birthday
Hello and welcome back to Perrill's digital marketing newsletter!
We're nearing the end of the year, but the digital news hasn't slowed down at all. We have plenty of updates to share, especially in the SEO and AI industries. Let's dig in!
Sites using Google-Extended jumped 180% in a month
Over 250 websites are now using Google-Extended, Google's tool for blocking Bard and other generative AI models from accessing website content. While this isn't a huge number, many of those sites are big names like The New York Times, Yelp, and Vox properties.
The number of sites using Google-Extended is continuing to grow, indicating there may be a trend toward sites taking action against AI companies potentially taking and using their content.
Deprecation of Crawl Rate Limiter Tool
Google Search Console's crawl rate limiter tool is getting deprecated on January 8th, 2024. With Googlebot able to handle a site server's reactions to Googlebot HTTP requests at a much quicker pace, the need for the crawl rate limiter tool has decreased over the years.
Bard can watch YouTube videos
Bard can now watch and understand YouTube videos, enabling users to request summaries, ask questions, or pull details out of videos. This development allows for richer conversations between YouTube users and Bard. This is one of many updates Google has made to Bard since its launch earlier this year as Google continues to make it as user-friendly and useful as possible.
Search quality rater guidelines changed
After almost a year without updates, Google is updating its Search Quality Rater guidelines. The update feels more focused on user needs and intent than past updates, which may indicate that Google's current results aren't meeting user expectations.
Google is simplifying its guidelines and Needs Met scale definitions, which help Google's search raters evaluate the performance of search ranking systems.
Search Engine Land outlined some of the biggest changes since the search quality rater guidelines update in their article. Some of the areas that changed included:
For a more in-depth analysis of these changes including their impact on Google's intent and meeting users' needs, check out Search Engine Land's site.
Search supports discussion forum
With a new update to Google Search, Google is adding structured data options to online forums to help users identify their perspectives in search results. By adding structured data to your discussion forum, Google can better identify online discussions and serve them to the right audiences.
Google Search Organization
Google is updating its structured data to support organization details for business identifiers including name, address, and more. Before this update, the only supported structured data were logos and URLs. The new elements may show up in search results, giving users a clearer understanding of a business before they click on a result. They'll be able to grab company details directly from search results.
November core update finishes rolling out
Google's November core update finished rolling out, marking the completion of the fourth core update since the start of 2023. Check your site for any major changes, and if you've noticed a loss in rankings, feel free to reach out to our team. We'd be happy to sift through the data with you and help troubleshoot.
Small business shopping
Google is adding a small business filter to Shopping to make it easier for shoppers to support small businesses. This update came just in time for Small Business Saturday, but the hope is that users will continue to utilize this filter on an ongoing basis.
To get identified as a small business, businesses can note their status in Google Business Profile or Merchant Center. It's a good tool for small businesses that could lead to increased discovery and purchases.
New Yahoo search
Bing and Google have introduced some pretty major updates to their search engines over the course of 2023, and now it's Yahoo's turn to roll out a new search experience.
Yahoo Search is launching a new search experience in early 2024. It's expected to start as a cosmetic update that might include a redesign. That will be followed by more technical AI advancements in the search engine. Pretty exciting stuff!
Monetize Insights
Microsoft's new tool, Monetize Insights, allows publishers to drill down into their campaign data to better understand their performance and optimize revenue streams.
The tool is a dashboard that has features like graphs and comparison charts for a quick overview of performance. It's great for identifying issues and trends, and could help publishers find ways to efficiently monitor revenue drivers.
Google to curb microtargeting
Google is updating its ads targeting policy to crack down on targeting by financial status. This update comes with restrictions on advertising related to consumer financial products and services.
The updated policy goes into effect in February 2024 and will prevent credit and banking ads from getting served to audiences based on factors including gender, age, parental status, marital status, or zip code. This update further protects user privacy while taking steps to prevent and discourage discrimination.
YouTube Shorts ads
Shorts ads are becoming available on marketers' YouTube accounts as YouTube moves the feature from beta to general availability. Shorts ads were announced earlier this year and provide an alternative to more traditional types of YouTube advertising. The ads allow advertisers to take a less polished, more relatable approach to advertising. In the past, YouTube ads have felt TV-quality, but now, these advertisers can run ads similar to TikTok or Instagram Reels ads, which usually feel more organic. These features are currently being rolled out.
Google under fire for showing ads on compromising sites
Google has been accused of displaying ads on compromising sites in the Google Search Partner network. The GSP network includes pornographic sites, sites that contain pirated content, and sites of companies located in countries that may be under sanctions by the US government. In other words, sites that most advertisers don't want their ads shown on.
These accusations come from an Adalytics study that referenced a Fortune 500 company that didn't know its ads were being served on these sites, leading to concerns over brand safety and privacy. It's a huge deal if these accusations are true and something that Google needs to take very seriously.
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X is losing its biggest advertisers
After Elon Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory, many of X's major advertisers have ceased advertising entirely. Companies including Disney and Universal are stepping away from their advertising accounts on X.
Musk apologized for his post on November 29th, stating that it was his "dumbest" social post ever. While he tried to distance himself from the post, he simultaneously showed total disregard for the advertisers choosing to step away from X.
X is facing a loss of up to $75 million in ad revenue by the end of this year. Major accounts have also stopped posting organically on the platform, taking a stand. This is an indicator of the current state of the platform as well as the work X, and Musk, will have to do to recover.
Snapchat is going ad-free
If you're willing to pay, that is! A new ad-free Snapchat subscription will allow subscribers to avoid in-app ads through a monthly fee of $10.50/month. This plan isn't widely available yet and is only in testing in Australian markets.
This update may make its way to the US, but only time will tell if the plan takes off. Snapchat relies pretty heavily on ad revenue, so the monthly plan would have to offset that potential loss in revenue.
Apple is sneaking around its competitors
Rather than take down its competitors head-on, Apple requested Amazon block competitors' ads on Apple's product pages. Amazon reportedly agreed to only serve ads at the bottom of the product pages, offering preferential treatment to Apple over competitors like Samsung and Microsoft.
It's unconfirmed whether or not Apple paid Amazon to receive special treatment, but there are screenshots of Apple product pages ad-free while competitors have ads on their pages. Another interesting development in the world of advertising equity!
New advertising SGE features
Google is introducing new AI capabilities for advertisers in SGE heading into the holiday season including new subcategories, photo shopping, and more options for the virtual try-on feature. Google is continuing to make it easy for users to shop and find what they're looking for, which is beneficial for brands and consumers alike. It simplifies the process by using AI to support consumer needs and interests.
LinkedIn's AI moderation tool
LinkedIn's new content moderation tool is a huge advancement in catching policy violations sooner. Powered by AI, this tool reviews content and can catch policy violations up to 60% faster. It can prioritize content that is likely to be violating policies and move those pieces of content up in the queue to get reviewed.
Another AI chatbot
Elon Musk is pushing X's new AI chatbot tool, Grok, by planning to add it to the main user interface. Access to the chatbot is currently pretty limited, but integrating it further could increase usage and interest. At this point, the value Grok will add to X is unknown, but it could potentially help with drafting posts and summarizing content. It's being trained on real-time X conversations, so it could be an interesting tool to experiment with if it becomes more widely available.
It's currently only available to the highest-paying subscription, the $16/month Premium+ subscription.
Threads topic tags
Threads is testing topic tags, which are different from hashtags . . . but not that different. The tags will allow users to link Threads updates to other posts of the same topic. It's like a hashtag without the actual hashtag symbol. Users can only add one tag to each post, so it's much more restricting than traditional hashtags.
Google search or TikTok search?
TikTok is testing displaying links to Google search results within its own search results page. These results would take the TikTok searcher out of the TikTok app and to a new search on Google. A few details remain unclear, including whether this test will result in a full rollout, if it would be a paid option for advertisers to use, and if it was a Google initiative to try to pull more searchers back to Google.
Spotify Wrapped is here!
Spotify released its highly anticipated Wrapped earlier this week, resulting in the usual influx of user-generated content on social media. New features this year included a "Me in 2023" section that shares your streaming habits and Wrapped Mapped that shows where in the world specific media is most popular. Spotify Wrapped remains one of the most successful marketing campaigns in that it encourages customer engagement and interaction with the brand.
How did your Spotify Wrapped look? Let us know in the comments who your top artist was!
WordPress AMP plugin vulnerability
The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) WordPress plugin had a vulnerability that allowed attackers to inject malicious scripts into susceptible websites. The vulnerability has since been patched, but with over 100,000 sites currently using the AMP plugin, sites need to check their installations and upgrade to version 1.0.89 or later. The exploit scored a 6.5 out of 10 on a vulnerability scale where 10 is the highest vulnerability, so this vulnerability is considered medium severity.
Amazon AI Chatbot
Amazon announced the release of a generative AI business chatbot called Q that is geared toward creating efficient, streamlined business processes. It integrates with over 40 enterprise applications including AWS, Slack, Microsoft, Salesforce, Jira, and more, and is currently available on a limited preview basis.
The goal of this tool is to make it easy to work between platforms and fully streamline business activities in one platform. It feels similar to Microsoft Copilot, but it's unique in that it integrates with many business applications. It also emphasizes privacy and security, so it could be a good choice for businesses once it's further along in testing and development
Fresh competition for Google AI
A new large language AI model from Inflection AI is outperforming Google's PaLM language model. It's called Inflection-2, and it outperformed PaLM in a series of tests that are benchmarked by other large language models in the industry.
GPT-4 already outperforms PaLM, but Inflection-2 is close behind GPT-4 in the benchmarks, suggesting there might be a strong competitor entering the AI arena.
Happy first birthday, ChatGPT!
ChatGPT has been around for an entire year, which is hard to believe. In its first year, it's been through plenty of updates and has reached over 180 million monthly users. It's a tool so many of us are taking advantage of, and in just a year, it's progressed in leaps and bounds.
If you want to take a walk down memory lane from the past year with ChatGPT, check out this article by Search Engine Land.
That's it for this edition of Unified Digital Digest! We'll be back in two weeks with more updates.