And the giants didn’t see it coming.

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POV by Mike Morris, VP, Paid Search

Big news out of Silicon Valley has everyone buzzing about Open AI’s entry into the search market with their SearchGPT engine. Their vision is to evolve from the historical Google layout, to one where it’s AI-powered model summarizes its findings and displays short descriptions enhanced with links to its sources of information should the user choose to visit those specific pages.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has been very critical of Google and their blue links with the belief that the future of the optimal search engine allows users to “search in a more intuitive and natural way.”(1) 

SearchGPT will be in a limited-release testing phase of 10,000 users before it becomes available to the public. Everyone else will have to wait on the edge of their seats before attaining hands-on experience.

What We Are Likely to See

• Engage with extended results in the sidebar Ability to ask follow-up questions​
• Linkouts and source material availability​
• Using direct content feeds with 3rd party partners to build its search results​
• Publishers’ ability to manage how they appear in featured content​
• Utilization of the GPT-4o mini model, an offshoot of GPT-4o – this is their fastest model to date ​
• The goal is to eventually integrate the search features directly into ChatGPT

SearchGPT Results opens a question box to create a more natural conversational environment

Glimpses Into How Search Might Change

We have already entered the next generation phase of Search Engines and how users utilize them, but this step intensifies the already heated race for future search market share (and we haven’t even mentioned social platforms). The exorbitant speed at which this technology is progressing and making these significant changes possible is creating an extremely exciting time to be in marketing. While OpenAI is backed by Microsoft, it’s in need of cashflow as its on pace to lose about $5 billion this year. It will be interesting to see if business operations play a role in this space moving forward and if an acquisition of Perplexity AI occurs, which offers functionality extremely similar.  ​

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Examples of SGE: 

Google’s Search Generative Experiences (SGE) and Its Potential Impact on SEO

Google’s Search Generative Experiences (SGE) launched in May 2023 and is currently in Beta but could potentially represent a huge shift in how search results are presented and optimized. For the first time, search engines are not just organizing but generating content, affecting how brands and products are perceived online. This AI-driven model is expected to roll out sometime in early 2024 and will potentially revolutionize the way users interact with search engines. 

Our POV

While SGE is still in beta, it’s too early to predict the impact, however Acronym anticipates that SGE may have some impact on the amount of SEO traffic that was remarkably similar to ‘zero-click’ results. To a certain extent, SGE feels like the evolution of Featured Snippets.  

Since the SGE will take up prime real estate on the search result pages, SGE could satisfy user queries directly on the search results page, which might cause a reduction of users clicking through to a web page. However, it depends on their query and response from SGE.   

How Can I optimize for SGE?

At the moment, in terms of earning SGE results, SEO best practices still should be followed. Here are some key strategies you can implement to potentially improve your chances. 

Content 

Content Quality and Topical Authority: having high-quality, unique content is very important.  Google SGE prioritizes content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). Instead of relying solely on keyword optimization, always focus on creating content that establishes topical authority in your niche and provides value to users. Think users first and not search engines. This includes using a conversational tone and addressing questions directly within the text​​​​. 

• Target relevant keywords, but don’t keyword stuff. Aim for natural language within your content that reflects the user’s search intent. 
• Consider adding concise summaries at the beginning of your content, especially for longer pieces. This helps SGE quickly grasp the main points. 
• Go beyond just factual information. Offer unique insights, opinions, and perspectives to stand out from the competition.  
• Optimize for Long-Tail Queries: SGE is expected to excel at answering complex, long-tail queries, making these an important focus area. Creating content that comprehensively answers user queries will be beneficial​​. 

Technical SEO Will Still Be Important:

• Ensure your site is mobile-friendly and loads quickly. SGE prioritizes user experience. BrightEdge, a leading SEO platform, found in their analysis that top ranking pages are now loading faster than ever before.  This is an element of SEO that you can control so always make sure your pages are optimized to load as quickly as possible, especially on mobile.     

Source: BrightEdge

Structured Data is Key

• Implement schema markup. This helps Google understand the structure and meaning of your content, potentially making it more eligible for SGE snippets. In BrightEdge’s study they also found  that though schema tags are not a ranking factor, those sites that are marked up with structured data tend to be ranking higher.  
• Optimize your on-page elements, i.e., meta descriptions and title tags. Make them compelling and relevant to your target keywords, but also ensure they accurately reflect your content. 

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Never fear! We have the full video here for you. Acronym’s SVP, SEO, Winston Burton joined RenderSEO, Co-founder, Rachel Gill to discuss how marketers can integrate ChatGPT into their Local SEO efforts.

A few key insights include:

• How ChatGPT can help with Google business profile listings
• How ChatGPT can be used to monitor local SEO performance
• How ChatGPT can help businesses localized in content creation

Watch below and let us know if you have additional questions or contact us if you could use help with your Local SEO strategies.

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Despite its similarities to ChatGPT, Google has been quick to emphasize that it has been developing its AI systems for six years, making it much more than just a newcomer to the market.

“AI is the most profound technology we are working on today. Whether it’s helping doctors detect diseases earlier or enabling people to access information in their own language, AI helps people, businesses and communities unlock their potential. And it opens up new opportunities that could significantly improve billions of lives. That’s why we re-oriented the company around AI six years ago – and why we see it as the most important way we can deliver on our mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Google has been vocal about its criticism of ChatGPT’s models, citing their inaccuracies and potential for reputational risk. However, Google’s own AI output is considered to be less likely to be caught by Google’s own crawlers, making it a more attractive option for those looking to use AI outputs for SEO purposes. It’s important to note that Google explicitly states that AI-generated content goes against its guidelines, and there is always a risk of errors, plagiarism, and misinformation.

In contrast to ChatGPT’s focus on outputting content, Google positions Bard as a tool for discovery and deeper understanding. Google plans to make Bard available in Search, where it will generate answers in-stream, and is also looking to release a standalone version of the Bard UI, along with developer releases. The company aims to create a suite of tools and APIs that will make it easier for others to build innovative applications with AI.

It’s clear that AI responders are the future of search, and with Google’s entry into the market, we can expect even more exciting developments in the coming months. In fact, just as Google announced Bard, Microsoft announced a press conference in conjunction with OpenAI, signaling that the search battle is back on.

If you’d like assistance in understanding or leveraging Bard, ChatGPT or any other AI tools in your digital marketing, please contact us today. We’re here to help.

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Currently, ChatGPT can answer questions, create FAQs and answers, compose blog posts, research papers, content briefs, outlines, articles, and even write code, to name a few uses of this tool.

ChatGPT is currently free and open to the public because OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is collecting research and feedback and wants to see how it will be adopted.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief, said on Twitter that ChatGPT had more than one million users in its first five days after launching and that the content is so good, sometimes it is indistinguishable from human-crafted prose.

With ChatGPT being very good and capable of creating great content, would it replace human writers, and should your brand create AI content for PPC, SEO and Social? 

Let’s find out.   

ChatGPTs potential use cases for SEO

With ChatGPT, marketers can perform SEO tasks faster, easier, and more efficiently. ChatGPT will not replace the need for SEO managers and leaders; however, as the models get better trained, Search marketers can optimize and create content quicker and be more efficient, which may require fewer resources. ChatGPT does have a lot of positives that can help SEOs do the following:

Pros

• Generate meta descriptions and title tags at scale.
• Create image captions, generate robots’ files and code.
• Create high quality content, including articles, blogs, FAQs and answers.
• Generate a list of relevant keywords for a topic, which can help with on-page optimization.
• Summarize content of a webpage or article which will improve content quality and readability.
• Solve writer’s block. Sometimes it can take a human time to think of new ideas and topics for content creation. ChatGPT can help streamline the ideation process and provide ideas or even draft the content.        

Limitations

While ChatGPT is ridiculously good and can generate human-like copy, it is not capable of understanding the nuances and subtleties of the human language the way that we do. For example,   

• ChatGPT’s content needs to be fact checked and edited because it is not 100% perfect or current.
• ChatGPT is trained on text and not user inputs, so it won’t always respond well to dynamic user inputs.

• The content needs to be checked for grammar. While the current model is testing well, and it will continue to get better overtime, the grammar is not always correct.
• If anyone asks the same question, they will get the same response, therefore content is not original and will still require a human to add that originality.
• ChatGPT does not state the source of the content and there are no built-in plagiarism tools to detect content that is not original.  
• The results are sometimes inaccurate and could lead to misinformation or safety issues.  

Should I create all my content using ChatGPT rather than human writers?

With ChatGPT being so good, you may ask yourself should I use it to create content instead of relying on human writers?

The answer is you can use both – if you do it the right way.

If you utilize ChatGPT and other AI content generation tools as your primary source of creating content, then you may want to do it with caution.

Google stance on automated content

Google stated that content generated using AI writing tools is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. In other words, Google views automated content as spam, which could trigger a manual penalty.

With Google’s helpful content update, content should be useful to end users. If you’re using AI-generated content that is not helpful and useful to end users, then you should proceed with caution.

Here is Google’s stance on auto generation content:  

“For us these would still fall into the category of automatically generated content which is something we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning,” explains John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate. “And people have been automatically generating content in lots of different ways. And for us, if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing the translation tricks that people used to do. My suspicion is maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old school tools, but for us it’s still automatically generated content, and that means for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So, we would consider that to be spam.”

Google’s spam policies state: 

Spammy automatically generated (or “auto generated”) content is copy that’s been generated programmatically without producing anything original or adding sufficient value; instead, it’s been generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. Examples of spammy auto-generated content include:

• Text that makes no sense to the reader but contains search keywords.
• Text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing.
• Text generated through automated processes without regard for quality or user experience.
• Text generated using automated synonymizing, paraphrasing, or obfuscation techniques.
• Text generated from scraping feeds or search results.
• Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding sufficient value.

If you’re hosting such content on your site, you can use these methods to exclude them from Search.

Where do we go from here?

Acronym’s CEO, David Rollo says, “AI will not only be a force for good; it will be, in fact, everywhere all the time. And that’s why it’s so crucial that we make it a reliable, safe, and responsible force in our lives (personally & professionally). Thanks to AI, humanity is no longer limited – we can work smarter, faster, and better.”

In fact, AI has been around for many years and has been used in content creation for a long time. Recently with the release of ChatGPT, AI has improved and become more widely available and adopted by the public.

Early forms of AI-generated content were primarily used for news summaries and weather reports. With the advancement of technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning, AI-generated content has become more sophisticated and human-like and is now being used in a wider range of applications and virtually has the potential to enhance content generation amongst other things. 

AI can help us learn how to write better, organize our thoughts better for writing, etc. Most jobs require some fluency in writing and it’s not something that comes easily to everyone – even talented writers have writer’s block. Throwing our thoughts on the

page, then leveraging AI to help organize those thoughts can be very helpful not only in the moment, but also as a tool for how to write more effectively.

As AI learns from us, we learn from it.

However, one consideration when utilizing AI-created content is authenticity. Millennials and younger Consumers want authenticity and honest commentary. It’s why they prefer TikTok. They are tired of echo chambers on social channels and AI has the potential to start curating echo chamber content.

In fact, there is a significant risk that content will become indistinguishable as more marketers rely on AI-curated copy, in the same way many websites look alike with the mass adoption of templated site design.

Therefore, it’s critical that marketers keep that human authenticity in their writing. While AI can help to make the writing process less challenging and to organize our thoughts more effectively, the human element must not be lost.

The use of AI in content creation is still in the early stages, and it is expected to continue to evolve and become more integrated into various industries. Microsoft is continuing its multi-billion-dollar partnership with OpenAI to accelerate the development of AI technology and make it accessible to everyone. ChatGPT also has a paid version which offers unlimited access to a faster version of ChatGPT, with the promise of new (paid) features on the way.

Will Google be able to detect AI content?

Over time Google will become smarter at detecting AI content but as long as the content is edited, written with accurate statements, factual and useful information, humans and machines can work together to create content, quicker, easier and faster while being useful, helpful and relevant.

There is talk that a new concept of Watermarking text will be coming to ChatGPT. This concept involves cryptography in the form of embedding a pattern of words, letters and punctuation in the form of a secret code so we can know if content was generated from ChatGTP.

Moving Forward

If your brand is using AI content and not checking to make sure that it is helpful, useful and has true and accurate information, you could potentially receive a manual action from by a manual reviewer, which could have a negative impact on your organic performance.

Google has raised alarms with the introduction of ChatGPT and according to reports from The New York Times, Google has plans to “demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year,” including unveiling more than 20 projects powered by artificial intelligence. At the moment, Google is considered behind the curve and needs to play catch up.

POV By Winston Burton, SVP, SEO

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