Hello!

I am beyond excited about the changes I have seen in Google Assistant this week. Google is making changes that I think are the beginning of a new era in how people get their information online.

I’ve written this episode in a tone that is meant to be read. I had hoped that you could read it with your Assistant. Unfortunately mine tells me it can't read this page. It will read some newsletter episodes and not others. I think it has to do with the content within. I will keep experimenting.

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Read this in the Search Bar ​Click here to read or comment online (or keep scrolling to read in this email.)​ This is a long episode, so it may get cut off in your email!!! You are currently reading, Search News You Can Use, my free newsletter. In case you missed this week's ​Marie's Thoughts, the paid newsletter:

I’ve written this episode in a tone that is meant to be read. Perhaps one day Google will allow me to share this with you to be read in my own voice! There’s a lot in here about Assistant. Bear with me as I really do think this is important and much more than what we have seen up to this point in terms of voice search.

I would love for you to contribute your thoughts to this conversation I started on X. (I'm getting better at calling it that!) I would like to not be the only person who is talking about how the changes that we are seeing in Assistant and Bard have the potential to radically change the search ecosystem that we currently know. Please do share your thoughts.

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Marie Haynes @Marie_Haynes Bard is getting better and better. And soon will it be even better once again when it runs on Gemini Ultra. Bard will soon be a part of Google Assistant. Some folks at 9to5Google who looked at the early files saw yesterday that mentions of Assistant with Bard were changed to… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1747636763986641119 https://twitter.com/DylanSeoSmasher/status/1747630937771319660 DylanSeoSmasher @DylanSeoSmasher Am I the only one that think CHAT GPT will kill Google search ? Everytime I'm doing a search on Google It's taking me 5x longer to get the info as one question on @OpenAI and I have the info 10:7 AM • Jan 17, 2024 0 Retweets 1 Likes

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In this episode we will discuss the following:

• Google Assistant now provides snippets from search results.
• Google Assistant will soon be connected to Bard.
• More helpful content being shown. My thoughts on how the assistant changes provide opportunities for those who create helpful content.
• My updated thoughts on how rankings work.
• Thoughts from Danny Sullivan on quality.
• Rumblings of a possible update.
• Manual action for author transparency.
• Is it worth buying premium ChatGPT prompts for SEO?
• OpenAI: Teams plan, how they are approaching the US elections, removing wording for not using ChatGPT for military warfare.
• GPTs now learn from chats and improve over time.
• An update on my book and course out soon.

The changes to Google Assistant are a big deal

This week Google announced that many of the features in Google Assistant are going away. The assistant will no longer do things like start a stopwatch on a smart display or speaker or reschedule a calendar event with your voice. The majority of media focus this week covered the layoffs of over 1000 people working in voice and hardware.

Yet, few are talking about these two lines in Google’s announcement:

“The microphone icon will now trigger Search results in response to your queries,” and “The microphone in the Pixel Search bar…will now activate Voice Search instead of Assistant.”

You might think…nah…I’ve used voice search on Google before and it’s so bad. We have yet to see voice search powered by Gemini Ultra. If you recall, Gemini Ultra is the version of Google’s most powerful language model that is trained on not only text, but also images and video. Gemini Ultra has an understanding of the connections between things that is much more complex than what we have seen in language models.

(I may be wrong on this. It's possible that ChatGPT-4 with vision can rival Gemini. Regardless, both are learning and improving.)

As Gemini continues to learn, I expect that it will sound more fluent and lifelike. It's really not too bad at this point though.

Back to Assistant...

Here is my summary of what’s important to know about Assistant right now. Think of it like your own personal librarian, an assistant who finds what you are likely to find helpful. (My assistant Bard gave me that analogy.)

It’s available on any phone. It’s preinstalled in Android devices and can be downloaded as an app for iPhones.

When websites are suggested, often it is just one that is suggested. For example, when I ask my Assistant for information on the helpful content system, it gives me one search result and that's Google’s official documentation.

Sometimes it will give me drop down lists with several websites recommended. There are often carousels of what looks to me to be the very definition of helpful content. I asked my Assistant to find me some SEO newsletters and was pleased to see mine mentioned, along with places on the web that recommend my newsletter.

Opportunities for content creators

Finally, the picture is becoming more clear for me about how creators of helpful content are going to find opportunity amongst all of the changes to Search we have seen. For a long time now I have thought, “OK, if Google is pushing us this hard to create helpful content, then why are we not seeing helpful content rank?” So many of you are working diligently, trying to have content that aligns with Google's content and seeing sites with no E-E-A-T soar ahead of you, or perhaps spammers who are using AI to trick Google's systems. Then, when Google hinted that they would reward hidden gems and the majority of what we have seen has been Quora, forum discussions and LinkedIn posts, I was losing hope for smaller bloggers.

Until just now.

Let me tell you about my husband’s experience with Assistant. He opened up an article on Maple Leafs Hotstove. You may recognize this site as it is run by one of my first employees, who is now off doing his own exciting things, Alec Brownscombe.

Alec is a great example of a hidden gem. He has blogged about the Maple Leafs for years, and learned to make a business out of it. Unfortunately though, in order to make money from his site, he has had to put more and more ads on it. It got to the point where we read it less and less.

Until today.

David asked his Assistant, “Read this aloud”. Within seconds, it generated a 15 minute video that read the entirety of the article. This ad was a part of the Assistant’s overlay. It highlights each word as it is read.

Oh, and I’ve realized that it’s not just a video. I can tap on the text anywhere on the page and it will start reading from there.

Here’s the amazing thing. David cannot stop talking about the article he listened to and how it changed his outlook on watching the Leafs. (It’s hard being a Leafs fan. Also, the article he read was not the one pictured. I'm happy to find it for you if you want to respond to this email.)

Here’s how this changes things. Alec has a new incentive when it comes to creating content. Rather than creating the type of content that he knows is likely to rank well in Google, he can focus on creating the type of content that ardent fans like David find interesting.

This content had David’s attention for a full 15 minutes, allowing for a lot of ad impressions. The ad in the overlay changed several times. I'm assuming Alec is paid for these impressions.

Now, let’s take this even further.

In May Google told us they were introducing a new era of AI-powered ads with Google. For now, AI is helping people craft good ads. And it's doing a lot of other things that I would be excited about if I were in ads. But imagine this…Let’s say Alec is able to put his own ad in there. Instead of Adsense’s algorithms deciding the reader wants to see an ad about Temu, they might see an ad that allows them to pay a monthly fee to chat with a Maple Leafs HotStove chatbot that has been trained on the entirety of what the site has published. Or set up trivia quizzes based on their content. Or look for statistics and trends throughout the years. What was that one thing that Sundin said years ago? You can chat with the tool about it.

Anyone with a trove of content is going to suddenly have a valuable resource and many different ways to share it. I believe Google will give us multiple ways to monetize this.

Smaller bloggers will have more incentive to develop an audience and create content that audience is hungry for.

I think the repercussions of this go even further.

For many large publishers, if I try to get Assistant to summarize or read aloud their article, it will tell me that there are restrictions and it is not able to do so. Let’s say there’s big news in regards to the Leafs. Which websites do you think David is going to seek out to learn more in depth information about this news? A major publisher that has blocked Google’s ability to summarize and read aloud with AI? Or a blogger whom he enjoys reading and learns a lot from?

Assistant will also summarize webpages. Here is Andy Simpson showing an example.

But I’m mostly excited about what is coming next.

Soon, Bard will be in Assistant. When that happens, my Assistant will answer any question I have and when necessary, point me to information on the web.

Again, this will be available on any Android or any iPhone using the Google app.

And just this morning I found a new setting on my phone that allows me to open Assistant with a new swipe gesture from either bottom corner of my screen, making it even easier to pull up the Assistant overlay at a glance. At first, I kept closing my app, but today, it's another gesture that has become second nature.

I can also invoke Assistant by tapping my Pixel earbud.

I find myself turning first to Assistant when I want to know something. It's easy to access. It is doing a good job at showing me the thing that gets me the answer I was looking for. And it will be even better once Bard, powered by Gemini Ultra is at the helm.

Speaking of this, just before publishing I read this article from 9to5Google which tells us that their latest decoding of the APK files for Android showed that all of the mentions of Assistant with Bard have been changed to simply Bard.

Mark my words. Assistant...I mean, Bard, is the new way people get their information and communicate with technology.

Here is my Assistant reading today's Search Engine Roundtable for me. Barry told me he has speakable markup on the site. Yet, I can get this to work on sites without markup as well.

We are going to want to learn more about what it takes to be recommended by people’s Assistants.

SGE? Or perhaps parts of SGE?

Remember the NYT article that told us that Google is creating a whole new search engine? In a podcast episode that I have not yet released, Mike King shared with me that there is evidence that this likely was referring to SGE.

What I have shared with you looks nothing like SGE, does it? Actually, if we look closer at what Assistant is showing me, it’s like it is deciding which section of SGE would be helpful to me. Perhaps it’s a direct answer, or it might be a carousel of helpful websites, or a maps listing to show me local businesses and reviews.

Cindy Krum commented that she sees Google flipping between old school rankings where there’s a knowledge graph on the right and then a different style she calls, “topic layer/entity style with cards”. She says, “The only thing triggering this different experience is a very long '&si=' parameter in the URL. This is possibly all relevant and related to the changes in Google Assistant that @Marie_Haynes has been talking about.”

In her tweet you can see an image that shows a different layout with nice boxes showing things like, Age, Spouse, Instagram and more. I think each of these could be something that could be surfaced by Assistant when it seems it would be helpful.

I’ve written more on my experiences so far with Assistant which you can read in this post called, Assistant and Search. Did Google just quietly launch a new Search Ecosystem?

Or you can ask your Google Assistant to find it for you.

OK, that was a ramble. Let’s get on to the Search News!

Important for SEOs this week

My updated thoughts on how ranking works

The more I study Google’s AI systems and the information we learned from the DOJ antitrust trial against Google, the more it becomes clear to me why Danny can say the things he says in the section below on quality.

After spending the last year writing my book (augh, it is almost done) let me share with you my understanding of how search works. This is going to sound like I’ve simplified things too much. Perhaps I have!

Funny story. I wrote out a big long explanation of how ranking works and then my Chromebook crashed causing me to lose all of the screenshots. Ah! I’m going to take that as a sign to save the explanations for my book and for now, learn to explain this more concisely.

The top 20-30 results for any search are re-ranked by RankBrain. Google uses many AI systems and many signals including rater ratings along with other signals like clicks and engagements that predict what a searcher is likely to find helpful. The signals are used in many AI systems. There are other signals that are used as well, including links. The goal of this whole complex system is to work together to figure out what a searcher is likely to find helpful. Google's been improving on this process for a long time now.

Therefore, once you’re ranking in the top few pages of results, the key to ranking well is to create content that your audience finds helpful. That's it.

I mean, yes, we need a site that is not technically challenged. And yes, there are things we can do to tweak and improve our chances of performing well such as working on core web vitals, and other things that we do for SEO. But really, the majority of the rankings are decided by systems that have been learning for years now and improving at understanding what truly is helpful to someone.

The key to ranking is to be helpful.

When this really sinks in, suddenly a number of things change in how we create content. If it hasn't sunk in, then hopefully it will if you read my book.

With this in mind, let’s move on to Danny’s most recent advice. He wrote a lot, so I’ll summarize and you can click the link to read more.

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Danny Sullivan shares thoughts on quality

Danny shared to dispel the myth that there is a perfect page formula you need to use to rank on Google. He told us not to follow the advice of SEO tools that say a page should be a certain number of words long. They’re based on averages and miss the point that different and unique pages can and do succeed in search.

Google’s key advice is to focus on doing things for your readers.

The more I understand how Google’s AI systems shape rankings, the more it makes sense that actually, the key to having helpful content is to have helpful content.

A few more tips from Danny Sullivan on X

Danny was asked about a page that was indexed, but won’t rank. He said it might be that Google just didn’t think it was relevant to show.

When asked about whether schema is a ranking factor, he said, “Those are display features. They don’t cause content to rank better.”

I'm soon going to be digging into understanding more about schema. It bugs me that I feel it's important but also, there's no solid consensus on whether it can actually help a site perform better in search. There are good reasons to implement schema, but I'm going to try and get some more clarity on this soon.

The home page for Chrome is becoming even more useful

Glenn Gabe noted that now we have the option to follow topics.

On my Chrome homepage you can see that I can choose Discover or Following. Today mine is mostly showing me sites that I follow. Sometimes I will see topics, like Fortnite, AI, LLMs or Google.

Several times today I have found myself turning to my Discover feed to find something to learn and then asking my Assistant to read it aloud to me.

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More interesting SEO news and info

There are rumblings of an update. Honestly, I don’t see how the SERPS could not be turbulent as Google makes more and more shifts towards offering people AI powered SERP features! I’ve stopped paying attention to updates unless Google has announced them or they are significantly more catastrophic than average.

I’ve updated my algo list with more information about the recent updates and links to more resources.

Remember the study we mentioned last week that said that 94% of links in SGE were not links from the top results? Gianluca Fiorelli shared a spreadsheet showing that for the search “things to do in Cancun” the majority, but not all of the links recommended were in the top 10. Some suggestions were pulled from page 2 or further.

James Dooley shared a screenshot of a manual action for author transparency. It says, “Your site appears to violate our transparency policy and lacks clear dates, bylines, information about authors, the publication, the publisher, company, or network behind it, and contact information. This is a new one for me!

Youtube is now making it easier to find step-by-step explainer videos for basic first aid and emergency care made by authoritative health organizations.

Ahrefs published an article about testing out a service that sells ChatGPT prompts for SEO. Si Quan Ong’s conclusion was that it’s not worth the money. It’s better to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus instead!

The /r/SEO subreddit has been taken over by crypto hackers. This is probably a good place to formally welcome you to join us here at the Search Bar!

Interesting AI news

ChatGPT now has a teams plan where you can collaborate. Instead of $20 per person it is $25, or, if you pay monthly rather than yearly, $30. You get higher message caps and also no training on your data.

OpenAI has proposed paying publishers a licensing fee of $1-5 million, which some are saying is laughable.

Also from OpenAI, they have published information on how they are approaching the upcoming US elections. They are working to anticipate and prevent relevant abuse and improve factual accuracy, reduce bias, and decline certain requests. Additionally, they are implementing a classifier for detecting DALL·E generated images and are working with the National Association of Secretaries of State for authoritative voting information in the United States.

Lots from OpenAI this week. They removed wording about not using ChatGPT for military and warfare from their use policy.

They also published information on using actions in your GPTs. Actions are where your GPT is able to actually do something by connecting with an API. We are moving towards the day when all it will take to connect with a software’s API is to use words to describe what you want to do.

​GPTs will now learn from your chats and improve over time. This will make them even more useful. My suite of GPTs to help you improve your content is almost complete! Early feedback is that they are super helpful!

GPT-4 was available for free in Microsoft Copilot, but now it is limited to non-peak times, or a paid product.

Elon Musk says we’ll have GPT-4 level AI on a laptop before too long.

Speaking of Elon, he shared a video of an Optimus robot folding clothes. It can’t yet do this on its own, but Elon says it certainly will soon be able to do it autonomously and in an arbitrary environment.

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Elon Musk @elonmusk Optimus folds a shirt 1:37 PM • Jan 15, 2024 36528 Retweets 269026 Likes Read 25341 replies

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Here’s a link to a really good recipe that ChatGPT made for me when I asked for ideas on how to use up the green beans in my fridge.

Walmart is expanding drone delivery to millions of people in Texas by partnering with a company called Zipline. What does this have to do with search? Imagine the day I tap my earbud, have a conversation with Bard about a product and then sign off on drone delivery and the product appears a few minutes or hours later. Oh wow. I come back to add this before publishing. I realized the article discusses a partnership with Wing. I did not know that Google owns Wing, a drone delivery company. This morning my Discover feed showed me this new article announcing Wing has new drones that are equipped for carrying up to 5 pounds and flying up to 12 miles round trip at a speed of 65 mph.

Google’s DeepMind is hiring research scientists to develop cutting-edge LLM’s and Mutli-modal models to tackle real-world healthcare challenges. There is at least one of you reading this who should apply even though you don't think you are qualified.

Recommended Learning

Here are some things I watched and read this week, along with a summary. I have a structured prompt in Google’s AI studio that uses Gemini to take my notes along with an article or video transcript and write a concise summary.

Then, I generally edit the summary so that it sounds more like what I would have written. Then that summary is fed back to AI studio to train it to get better and better at producing the output I want.

Shane Legg, a DeepMind CoFounder, known for coining the term "AGI" (Artificial General Intelligence), believes there is a 50% chance of AGI being achieved by 2028. DeepMind’s first goal was to build AGI. He defines AGI as a system that can perform all cognitive tasks that humans can, possibly even more. Legg emphasizes the need for society to recognize the imminent arrival of a very powerful and intelligent AI and its potential impact, both positive and negative.

​How to use data-nosnippet to block specific content from being used in a Google search snippet [Experiment] - by Glenn Gabe. This was a fascinating read. Actually, I had my Google assistant read this to me and wow, did I learn a lot. You can stop Google from using certain text on a page in a snippet by adding some html.

In this video, Ilya Sutskever discusses the significance of unsupervised learning in extracting hidden secrets from compressed data. He emphasizes the importance of the “second stage” in ChatGPT, where bounding boxes are communicated to continually improve the fidelity, reliability, and precision of following intended instructions. It is this second stage that I am finding fascinating. It’s what makes ChatGPT so much more than just a language model. The system is continually learning and improving. Sutskever highlights that reliability is crucial for enhancing the usefulness of these tools and expresses optimism that further research will lead to higher reliability.

​The Value of Traffic in the Age of AI - How Publishers Can Thriveby Scott Purcell.

The publishing industry is facing major changes, and publishers need to focus on producing original, authoritative content, adapting to AI, and innovating in content delivery. Authentic organic traffic and native content are becoming much more valuable as AI-generated content floods the internet, while the publishing industry is also facing a decline in programmatic ad revenue and a shift towards subscription and membership models. We have a lot to think about!

Andy Simpson recommended this Turing Lecture on generative AI. I’ve added it to my watch list.

Tools

Last week I mentioned Lidia Infante’s bio to schema GPT. She has written an article talking about why and how it was created.

Will Critchlow has made a robots.txt testing tool.

The above tools are not sponsored mentions, but if you'd like me to mention your tool there are some options here for advertising. Although we will see! As I logged in to send this email Convertkit invited me to an Ad share program. I may give this a try.

Marie’s Thoughts. Ep 18: Examining a Search Journey within Assistant

Along the way in this episode, I share examples on where Assistant recommends websites. And some thoughts on why those were included. I believe that those sites that get recommended in Assistant will have all sorts of opportunity to create content and turn that into profit.

We’ll look for evidence to support my theory that Google is rewarding is content that aligns with their guidance on creating helpful content. Really though, it’s not that complicated. Google is rewarding content that people tend to find helpful and reliable. Assistant is recommending content that it thinks you will find helpful and reliable.

Continued in Marie’s Thoughts (paid newsletter $18/m)

Ep 18: Examining a Search Journey within Assistant This week Google announced changes to Google Assistant. Assistant will now show us snippets from Search Results. It is essentially voice search, except, the way that the snippets are assembled along with conversation, they really seem to be good at answering my questions. I think that with these changes, Google introduced a whole new search ecos... Read Article

Ep. 17: Become a better prompter by learning with prompts that will improve your SEO Jan 5, 2024 This episode is a workbook that will give you prompting ideas you can use to improve your SEO. We’ll use OpenAI’s prompting guide for some inspiration to help us analyze our content in the eyes of Google’s SEO guidance and find ways to improve it. You can click this link to get a Google doc that you can make a copy of and work throug... Read Article

Ep. 16: Assignments - Improving engagement and getting brand mentions New in this episode: Assignments. These are training exercises that will not only help you learn, but come up with a myriad of things you can do to improve the quality and helpfulness of your website. I've used Gemini to help me make assignments out of some of the things we can learn in search this week. You can read my thoughts and then jump in... Read Article

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Ethan Lazuk 🪬 @EthanLazuk If you get @Marie_Haynes newsletter, I'd recommend checking out the examination of a search journey with Google Assistant from today. Won't spoil the plot, but very cool! Fascinating to see the growing opportunities to get visibility in new Search surfaces or experiences. 4:30 PM • Jan 12, 2024 0 Retweets 1 Likes

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This week’s upcoming MT episode

This week I hope to do a deep dive into learning more about schema, so no voting on the topic! I have had some questions that I can’t answer fully. I want to go through this interview with Martha Van Berkel and learn more.

Google says schema is not a ranking factor. So why add it? I plan to dig deeper. This episode will be out late Friday.

My book and course are coming

How long have I been promising this for? I am working furiously on this and it is so good. The book explains in great detail what is important for us to know about how Google ranks results and looks at how Google is rewarding helpful content in more and more places.

I’m most excited about the GPTs. They take my knowledge, the selected text I’ve given it (like specific parts of the rater guidelines) and give you an Assistant to talk to to brainstorm with on improving your content to make it more helpful.

Stay tuned!

I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please do comment in the Search bar with your thoughts.