In an AI World, Is SEO Dead?
Now that Google searches will present AI “summaries” instead of traditional results, does SEO even matter any more?
by Tod Maffin (LinkedIn • social media)
Today's News
SEO • Did Google’s AI Just Kill the SEO Industry?
Is SEO Dead? Moz’s Chief Scientist Weighs In
Watch the Full Unedited Interview
BRAND SAFETY • Does Ad Adjacency Even Matter?
VIDEO • Your Long Reels Are Hurting Your Reach
REDDIT • Sued for Not Providing Ad Click Detail
COPYCATS • TikTok Collab and Instagram Snaps
SEO • Did Google’s AI Just Kill the SEO Industry?
There was a time when SEO was simple.
You’d just decide on a keyword you wanted to rank for — say, “personal injury lawyer” — and you’d spam that on all your web pages.
But Google caught on. So then we starting putting our keywords in the footer of our web pages, in tiny print, with the font color the same as the background.
There was the “keyword in the headers” trick, the “keyword in the meta description” trick (which, actually, never worked), and on and on.
Was “Zero-Click” the Canary?
Google had some tricks up its sleeves too. Perhaps the one that shook up the SEO industry the most was its pivot to the “zero-click” strategy. You’d search for “how old is vin diesel” and it would give you the answer at the top of the search results page. (He’s 56, by the way.) No clicking required, although at least there were search results pages below if you wanted to dive deeper.
Now, the SEO industry may be facing its most challenging period ever — being simply cut out of the loop, and replaced by AI.
Think of it like those “zero-click” summaries, but smarter, more personalized to the searcher, and more detailed. This has been in testing under the name Search Generative Experience for a year; it’s rolling out in the U.S. this week.
Wired Magazine tested this new version of Google, and here’s what they found:
Hallucination Hell
Not to mention: AI sometimes just makes things up.
Last year, a writer for The Atlantic asked Google to name an African country beginning with the letter “K.” Google’s AI (which, to be fair, was using ChatGPT at the time) couldn’t even come up with Kenya. “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa,” it said, “None of them begin with the letter ‘K.’ The closest is Kenya, which starts with a ‘K’ sound, but is actually spelled with a ‘K’ sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.”
So — how do brands get their content in front of people if Google is simply copying what you have on your site and showing it to people?
Is SEO, as we know it today, dead?
Is SEO Dead? Moz’s Chief Scientist Weighs In
Tom Capper leads the search science team at Moz — one of the oldest and most respected SEO platforms. I spoke with him earlier today.
Is SEO dead?
Absolutely not. People have been predicting the death of SEO. It's kind of a joke within the industry, like SEO is dead for a long, long time.
Some people might remember when featured snippets came out. And again, you had this sort of suddenly this thing at the top of search results that was pushing the organic down. There was a lot of doom saying, I would see this moment as quite similar to that one where it's going to change SEO, but it's not going to kill it.
Ultimately, people are still looking to Google and similar platforms to to find businesses, to find services.
And there are still ways to win at that game or not. When Google returns these AI generated results, they do come with source links.
Is there anything that marketers can do to optimize their web pages so that we get into these AI generated answers and become a source link? It's not perfect, but at least we can get something. Can we do anything to optimize our pages for that?
I almost want to say don't try to optimize for it as it is now, because this is going to change too rapidly. The kinds of places where these appear, Google says they're driving clicks. I want to wait and see on that.
I'm really not convinced that these results are driving that much traffic to websites. So I don't think it's a great use of your time right now to be trying to appear in these results.
AI, of course, hallucinates and makes things up. What can we do if Google's AI results at the top of the search pages get something about our brand wrong?
Right now, there's not a lot you can do about it. Obviously, you can [use] robots.txt [to] block the AI. Google has a Google extended user agent which you can block, which means that their model can't ingest information from your site.
But that doesn't mean that they can't hallucinate about your brand because your brand is mentioned in all kinds of places.
Right now, I would say there is nothing you can do, and that is a problem.
I wish there were a tag that said “no hallucinate” that we could put in our in our meta tags.
Yeah. Don't mention me or something like this. But even then, would you take that? Probably not.
Like you'd rather you don't want to completely exclude yourself from being listed in like a list of products or something like this. So, yeah, it's tricky.
Long term, was this the right play for Google?
I think this is a misstep under investor pressure.
Basically, there's a lot of pressure on Google right now to be appearing to match and compete with what OpenAI and Microsoft are doing. But I don't think this is an improvement either for Google or for their for their users.
My main worry for SEO is not that SEO becomes an irrelevant tactic or something like this. It's that Google may destroy their own moat here. There is a danger here to to the ecosystem as a whole.
If Google is making big missteps and this looks like it, it might be one.
Watch the Full Unedited Interview
The Final Word
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BRAND SAFETY • Does Ad Adjacency Even Matter?
Brand safety on social media platforms has largely been an effort in keeping bad things away from your brand. You don’t want a Neo-Nazi post above your Facebook ad, of course, but some brand safety tools even let keep some space between your content and whole swaths of topics: War, politics, crime, and so on.
How much does this actually matter?
A new report from the Stagwell agency called “The Future of News: Ad Adjacency Study” finds that maybe we’ve been worrying too much.
The Research
Stagwell, in collaboration with major media publishers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, tested this with 50,000 American adults.
The research focused on whether ads appearing alongside news topics considered “unsafe” — such as crime, inflation, conflict in the Middle East, and political stories about Donald Trump and Joe Biden — influenced consumer behavior differently compared to ads placed next to “safe” topics like entertainment and sports.
Study participants were exposed to real news stories from these publishers, accompanied by advertisements from well-known brands. Participants were then asked to rate their likelihood of purchasing from the featured brands and their overall perception of these companies.
Hot Topics Don’t Really Matter
Contrary to what we marketers have believed for generations, the findings revealed that the nature of the news content—whether deemed “unsafe” or “safe”—had no noticeable effect on the participants' willingness to buy or their favorable views toward the brands.
Even the cohorts that some people believe to be particularly sensitive to hot topics — Gen Z and mothers — had minimal difference.
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VIDEO • Your Long Reels Are Hurting Your Reach
Instagram says you might be working too hard on your brand’s Reels — making them longer than you should.
The company says Reels longer than 90 seconds can actually hurt your reach.
This information came from a presentation Instagram’s content team showed at a creator event in New York last week. One slide in particular listed things that can help distribution and things that can hurt it.
What Helps
Drive authentic engagement
Consider when your audience is online
Upload highest resolution
Post your content at the same time as other platforms
What Hurts
Engagement bait
Reels longer than 90 seconds
Videos with 3rd party watermarks
Low quality videos
Posting content you didn't make
Most of these are evergreen advice points, but one that stood out for me was that one about posting at the same time as when you post your updates on other platforms. Andrew Hutchinson at Social Media Today speculates that this might be due to broader branding and generating all the discussion at one time.
The one about the 90 seconds is also a surprise.
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REDDIT • Sued for Not Providing Ad Click Detail
A Reddit advertiser is taking the company to court, claiming Reddit sold ads without being able to show that real people were clicking on them.
Specifically, this company asked Reddit for the IP addresses of everyone who clicked on the ads. Reddit did provide a click log, but without any IP addresses.
LevelFields says either Reddit has them, and isn’t giving it to them for some nefarious purposes, or they don’t have the IP addresses, which would be even worse from a security standpoint.
In a financial disclosure filing, Reddit said:
To help advertisers understand if their reach was effective, we offer solutions such as Oracle Moat-verified viewability, audience verification through NCSolutions, and DoubleVerify for fraud.
While we invest in efforts to detect and prevent inauthentic content or invalid traffic, including investments in proprietary technologies to detect and address content and vote manipulation, we may be unable to adequately detect and prevent such abuses.
Reddit S-1 filing
LevelFields is asking a judge to certify its claim as a class action.
According to a recent Juniper Research study, more than one in five dollars spent on ads last year was lost to click fraud.
COPYCATS • TikTok Collab and Instagram Snaps
Which brings us to another episode of Who’s Copying Who. Today, TikTok is copying Instagram (again), and Instagram is copying BeReal (again).
TikTok 👉🏻 Instagram
TikTok is getting ready to release a new collaboration function in the app, if back-end code is anything to go by.
It will let you tag collaborators on a post, which will then show their profiles on your post in a little pop-up window.
So far, the code reveals that:
Creators will be able to invite up to 5 other accounts to make a collaboration post
You’ll be able to approve collaborator listings
You can decline invitations from posts you don’t want to be part of, and remove yourself even if the post with your brand name has gone live already
You’ll be able to invite other accounts to collab up to four times each month
Yes, it’s basically a photocopy of Instagram’s collaborative posts function, with a couple of small tweaks.
This isn’t out yet, but looks to be coming pretty soon.
Instagram 👉🏻 BeReal
Instagram is turning to an app that’s sort of dormant for inspiration — and it’s not the first time.
They’re working on something called Peek, which lets users share a quick unedited, unfiltered pic of themselves. This is right out of the BeReal playbook, of course. The photo then shows up in their friends’ Inboxes, and those friends will be able to view it only once before it disappears.
And Finally…
Google is launching a new feature that will show you search results from… the World Wide Web!
Here’s how this ground-breaking feature works: You type in something you’re searching for, and Google will show you a list of web pages with those search terms in it.
And if you’re thinking right now — come on, that’s how Google works now.
Is it?
Because nowadays when you search Google, you get all sorts of crap at the top: Videos, knowledge panels, images, Reddit posts from 2009, sponsored carousels, map locations, soon AI summaries, and maybe somewhere at the bottom web pages. Maybe.
So yeah, Google is bringing back the web search: a clean, simple list of web pages with a lot of junk removed: Specifically, knowledge panels, featured snippets, shopping modules, and the new AI summaries.
You might have to go hunting for it. Sometimes it’s a filter along the top, more often than that it’s buried under the More link.
The grumpy old man in me is pleased.
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