SEO News Round Up – July 2024

We’ve pulled together all the news you need to know on what’s been happening with Google, and search more generally, in July – so you can keep up to date!

Google AI Overview occurrences dropping

• Originally coined as Search Generative Experience (SGE), Google recently updated the name of the AI answer interface that appears at the top of certain SERPs (search engine results pages) to AI Overviews, along with its full public rollout in the USA in May. If you are wondering what these look like, check out this video here.
• This will eventually roll out globally, but no timelines have been announced yet. Based on previous US-centred Google updates, I’d imagine this to be with us in the next 6 months and if you are wondering about impact to the results pages, latest research says AI Overviews are appearing for ~7% of queries at present, trending down from 15% upon launch. Pixel space is also declining as Google work out what the perfect balance users are looking for versus traditional search results.
• According to the same research, Reddit and Quora visibility/prevalence in AI Overview answers has ‘declined to near zero’.
• This is perhaps unsurprising given the amount of backlash (and mockery) pointed toward Google when they first unveiled the offering to the public, due to the inaccuracy of the answers provided by AI Overviews and the frequency of user-generated content it cited as gospel.

Bing’s growing search market share

• Bing now has a 4.5% search market share, up from 4.2% H1 YoY.
• When you consider how many searches are made per day (billions), this is a huge quantity of people now using Bing and Q4 FY24 (released 30/07/24) figures state ‘Search and advertising revenues increased by 19% YoY‘.
• This isn’t unexpected. There has been uproar around the general quality of Google’s results pages recently, mainly centred around an increase in UGC sites ranking highly (Reddit, Quora, etc.) and smaller specialist websites being demoted in favour of larger brand sites that lack sector expertise and relevance.
• Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI allowed them to beat Google to market regarding an AI-search offering, integrating Copilot into their search engine last year. 13 billion chats have occurred on the platform to date.

• This forced Google’s hand and their first public showing of their chatbot ‘Bard’ lost the company $100 billion overnight as a factual error was found in Google’s advertisement for the chatbot. They have been playing AI catch-up since. 
• However, Google’s share of organic search is still really strong at 92%.

Google earnings report shows search revenue up 14% YoY

• Even with the introduction of Chat GPT into people’s everyday lives, revenue from companies willing to pay to appear on Google is now at $48.5 billion per year, an increase of 14% from last year.
• Even though the search experience may be getting worse (or is just evolving?) companies are still spending big money to appear at the top of the results pages as they know it is still the dominant platform websites receive traffic from. See this insight from a January Sparktoro study, that shows 70% of all referral traffic coming from search engines – so this is still the place for brands to be seen:

Google is now showing Ads mixed in with organic results… in 0.3% of SERPs

• Google is always testing new SERP features and whilst they do always have the user in mind (if they didn’t, even more people would be migrating to Bing and others) their core goal is revenue generation from Ads.
• Over time, Search Ads have essentially become visibly identical to organic results. The only differentiator at present is the word ‘Sponsored’ above them:

• So it is no surprise that Semrush has just released some data showing that ads are also now appearing within the organic results (separate from the ones at the top of the SERPs) for 0.3% of SERPs.
• It may be that Google rolls this back completely rather than take it further, but one for us to keep an eye on.

Reddit has blocked all search engines from crawling its website except for Google

• Reddit’s rise in organic visibility has been astronomical over the past year.
• A widely held view is Google began showing more Reddit results as its attempts at surfacing the information people wanted were failing, especially with the rise of AI-generated spammy content. This was solidified with two big algorithm updates.

• Interestingly, in February, Google struck a deal with Reddit, reportedly worth $60 million annually, to license Reddit’s data for AI model training. 
• And now Reddit has blocked all search engines except Google from crawling the community-based platform.
• ‘This is not at all related to our recent partnership with Google’ a Reddit spokesperson said. “We have been in discussions with multiple search engines. We have been unable to reach agreements with all of them, since some are unable or unwilling to make enforceable promises regarding their use of Reddit content, including their use for AI.”
• As with most big tech ‘agreements’ this will probably end up with the regulators.

The next ‘Core’ Update of the Google algorithm is imminent

• On June 16th, Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said he expects the next ‘Core’ Update to roll out in the coming weeks.
• As mentioned before there has been a lot of heat from content creators, niche bloggers and industry expert sites around Google giving preference to larger, more powerful publisher-style websites that lack specific knowledge and expertise to rank, yet are still able to.
• This statement from Danny would lead you to believe this update will look to remedy that somewhat – “I do hope we can improve in some of these cases where creators with their hearts in the right places, and who are doing the real content effort behind that, are rewarded as we should be doing.”

SearchGPT is on the horizon for all

• OpenAI has introduced SearchGPT, a new AI-powered search engine designed to compete with Google, Bing and other AI engines such as Bezos-backed Perplexity. 
• SearchGPT provides direct answers to user queries with clear source attributions, rather than a list of links to websites, per Google and Bing.
• Similar to ChatGPT, Copilot and Google’s AIO, it supports dynamic interactions, allowing users to ask follow-up questions and it maintains context across queries​.
• It is also stated to attribute citations and references more fairly than ChatGPT does at present, which is a win for publishers – OpenAI states that ‘SearchGPT was developed in collaboration with various news partners, which include organizations like the owners of The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and Vox Media’ and that publishers can ‘manage how they appear in OpenAI search features’.
• At present, a prototype version has launched to 10,000 test users and a full release timeline has not been announced yet. There are no ads on the product, so you would assume that will come with full launch unless they make the platform fee-based – or perhaps a combination of both.
• From early testing, when searching software & commerce queries, the search engine pulls from listicle articles, not individual products or landing pages. This just furthers the need to ensure your products and services are being featured on as many relevant, authoritative third-party websites as possible, to allow the AI to determine the quality of your offerings.
• We will keep you in the loop as things develop here over the coming months.

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