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📰 News & updates

Google launches Gemini Business & Enterprise: More Google renaming and more money for Google.

How many news websites block AI crawlers?: By the end of 2023, 48% of the most widely used news websites across ten countries were blocking OpenAI’s crawlers. A smaller number, 24%, were blocking Google’s AI crawler.

🔝 SEO

SEO reporting: The best SEO reports are data-led, actionable, and persuasive. Chris shows how to build your SEO report and what to include, from an executive summary to content performance to the SEO roadmap.

Mental models for SEO: Mateusz gives you three helpful mental models for your SEO work and three you should approach with caution. My personal favorite: First principles thinking, which is a problem-solving approach that involves breaking down complex problems into their most basic elements and reassembling them from the ground up.

How Google is killing independent sites like ours: Gisele Navarro is angry. And she brought receipts. Google’s preference for big brands is causing their search result quality to decline badly.

Winning and losing big Google updates: A 50-site case study: Cyrus Shepard examined 50 sites that either lost or gained significant organic traffic across Google updates between August and December of 2023. He then hand-collected over 2,500 UX and on-page data points. For each site, he examined the live URL that lost the most traffic during the time period. All sites were evaluated on mobile. His results:

💻 Digital marketing

Best Ahrefs use cases for content marketers: These are Ryan’s “can’t-live-without” Ahrefs use cases. The one I think is most underrated: Instant keyword clustering.

Content marketing trends: Some key insights:

• AI usage is up, from 64.7% in 2023 to 83.2% in 2024.

• Humans still perform better — 20.9% of users who weren’t using AI reported being very successful, while only 12% that used AI did.

• Link building focus is on the rise, with only 5.5% of respondents saying they will not prioritize it compared to 14.7% in 2023.

I analyzed 5M freelancing jobs to see what jobs are being replaced by AI: There’s a noticeable decrease in writing, customer service and translation jobs on Upwork since the release of ChatGPT. Web design, graphic design, software development and video production jobs have been the most resilient and have not seen any drop in demand.

Till next time ;)
Cheers,