💀 Weekend Update: How AI Overviews is Already Impacting SEO

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that helps you make sense of headlines like this:

Here’s to Fucksmith, he is legend 🫡

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ TikTok’s Massive New Ad Tools👀
→ Should Every Marketer Be On Reddit?🤯
→ How AI Overviews is Already Impacting SEO💀
→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Pod 🗣️🎙️​

In episode 69 of TWIDM, James and I share our insights on how to effectively warm up a large email list and increase the chances of getting your emails delivered to the inbox. We also talked about the benefits of using a burner domain to send out initial emails and the use of warm-up services to build domain reputation. Tune in.

​YouTube​

​Apple Podcast​

​Google Podcast​

​Spotify​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ Look, we’ve watched Google stack a massive collection of Ls over the years. But this AI Overviews thing is about as bad as it gets. But if you’re interested in the practical side of how AI overviews might impact SEO, this piece explains how the feature works, how to monitor its impact on your rankings and traffic, and more. Based on early analysis of 1,000 total keywords from ten diverse clients, AI overviews:

- appeared for 15% of queries

- varied drastically across industries, ranging from 5-25%

- occasionally appears for “longer-tail queries with some transactional intent,” but “head terms do not appear to typically show AIO results”

- are no longer showing for keywords with local intent

- mostly appeared for “informational queries”

For explanations of all of this and more, click through.

→ But if you love the schadenfreude of Google flopping endlessly into oblivion, here are some highlights (or… lowlights?):

- Q: How to recover from the HCU? A: “Use AI to suggest content”

- Eating rocks for health, thx The Onion​

- Giving literally life-threatening health advice

→ If you’re looking for a proper overview that the rest of the country is reading and not just marketing nerds, here’s the New York Times piece on the fiasco. And if you prefer to skip on the failin’ NYT, here’s an Axios article. BTW— if you’re looking for a way to turn AI Overviews off, there isn’t one offered by Google itself. But there is a Chrome extension for turning them off… still, why would you want to deprive yourself of the comedy?

→ Notice a lot of volatility since the Site Reputation Abuse update a few weeks ago? You’re not alone. Well, what if I were to tell you Google hasn’t even started rolling out algorithmic penalties yet.

→ We’re also starting to understand the machinations guiding the Reddit/Google partnership re: with embedded comments and upvotes.

→ On the plus side, GA4 is getting its act together and now improving its real-time metrics, finally catching up to Universal Analytics and showing users in the last 5 minutes.

AI Insight 🤖

Google AI is in shambles, so I’m sure OpenAI is capitalizing by staying free of drama, yeah?

…yeah?

→ OpenAI’s deal w/ WSJ and NewsCorp is a game-changer, tho. Here’s a deep dive explaining how OpenAI “will use content from News Corp’s consumer-facing news publications, including archives, to answer users’ queries and train its technology.”

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ No matter how you feel about Reddit personally, it’s a top 5 social media site on the planet, and, here’s a case for “Why Every Marketer Should Be On Reddit.” No lie, it’s difficult to break through as many Reddit communities are antagonistic toward advertising, but its users are unique enough to be worth special consideration:

- 82 million (16.4%) of 500 million users visit daily

- on average users spend 20 minutes on the platform each day

- 75% of users trust Reddit re: making purchasing decisions

Along w/ general info, this piece looks at particularly effective Reddit marketing campaigns by noosa yogurt, Sony, and more.

→ TikTok just dropped the DL on its new suite of ad tools @ the TikTok World 2024 event. The biggest announcement was probably “Symphony,” an AI assistant that helps w/ scriptwriting, video production, video promotion generation, and even more vague tasks like brainstorming. This is basically a move to centralize all of TikTok’s AI tools into one consolidated platform. Seems helpful, IMO.

→ TikTok is also testing 60-minute video uploads and a Collaboration feature.

→ If using Snap as an ad platform is part of your social media strategy, this update on its DR improvements is also worth a look.

→ Instagram is working on a feature that lets you put together a public Reels playlist​

Jacky Chou​
Founder of Indexsy
hello@indexsy.com
Let's Connect on Twitter👇

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