Niche Twins - 🍕 Have you tried glue in your pizza?

TGIF. This is the Niche Nugget. A monthly roundup where we bring you SEO and creator news and insights from across the industry.

What happened? What's it all mean? We've got you covered.

Here’s the crispy nuggets we've cooked up you in May 👨‍🍳:

Google's CEO says it best when he says nothing at all
OpenAI's two steps forward, one step back
SEO memes of the month

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Google Is on the Verge

Lowdown

As usual, Google dominated the headlines this month...

The Verge Interviews Google CEO: A few days ago, the Verge's Nilay Patel sat down with Google's CEO Sundar Pichai and asked some pretty hard hitting questions around the state of AI and Google Search. At multiple points, Nilay handed Sundar his phone and asked him to see first hand just how poor the quality is for various queries. Imagine handing the CEO of Google your personal phone? A pretty ballsy move and a refreshing change of pace from the usual PR softball questions Sundar is used to. While Nilay captured the sentiment of small publishers perfectly, as with any interview, it takes two to tango. And Sundar's evasive, high level and opaque responses left a lot to be desired.
AI Overviews Launched in the US: On May 14th Google rolled out AI-Powered Overviews (formerly SGE) to US search results. These Overviews combine Google's language model Gemini with their traditional Search systems to quickly pull from multiple sources and provide users with an answer summary at the top of the page. Early user feedback suggests the model has some serious training to do. One viral example is the result for the query "cheese not sticking to pizza". The AI Overview suggested that the searcher "add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce". The source that the model relied on? An 11-year-old Reddit comment from someone with the username 'F*cksmith'. You can't make this stuff up.
Google I/O 2024: In addition to the AI Overviews announcement during the annual I/O developer conference earlier this month, Google also released a number of new features that truly start making Gemini multimodal. Project Astra for example allows you to open up the camera on your phone and start audibly asking Gemini questions about your surrounding environment. Another cool update is Ask Photos, which allows users to directly query their Google Photo library. For example, you could say "show me the photos from every national park that I've visited" and Google Photo can automatically surface them without you needing to go aimlessly digging through your archives.
Site Reputation Abuse Rollout: Google's new site reputation abuse spam policy was stated to go in effect on May 5, 2024. Commonly referred to as "parasite SEO", the update is targeted at “third-party content produced primarily for ranking purposes and without close oversight of a website owner” and “intended to manipulate Search rankings”. This spam update has already resulted in manual actions (a number of which have already been reportedly lifted), but just yesterday Google confirmed that the algorithmic actions on site reputation abuse have not gone live yet...so stay tuned.

Takeaway

The big question right now for site owners who haven't already been nuked, is what will the impact of AI Overviews be on Google search traffic?

Sundar insists that "on aggregate", Google's testing has revealed that AI Overviews lead to an increase in searches.

He goes on to suggest that users are prompted to ask more complex questions that were previously too challenging.

Really?

If Sundar hypothesized that the increase in searches they are seeing are most likely due to users recognizing that the initial AI Overview surfaced was flat out wrong, so they had to search again - that I could get behind.

But for now, Google refuses to share this data publicly.

And since they have also not yet committed to designating AI driven traffic in Google Analytics, I guess we'll have to take their word for it. 😉

Open AI’s Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

OpenAI continues to move at breakneck speed while managing to place themselves in the middle of yet another controversy...

Lowdown

OpenAI Partners With Reddit: On May 16th, OpenAI announced that they had signed a deal with Reddit, giving their ChatGPT chatbot direct access to Reddit's content. This comes just three months after Google's $60 million per year licensing deal with Reddit. The deal makes OpenAI a Reddit advertising partner and will result in Reddit users and moderators gaining new AI-powered features.
OpenAI Strikes Deal with News Corp: Just a week after the Reddit deal, OpenAI struck a content deal with News Corp estimated to be worth more than $250 million over five years. The agreement gives OpenAI access to leading News Corp publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, the TImes of London, the Sun, the Australian, Barron's and MarketWatch.
GPT-4o Release: Said to be 2x faster and 50% cheaper than GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a true step towards much more natural human-computer interaction. The most impressive new feature is their real time translation capabilities. As part of a live demo, an Italian and English speaker communicate with each other via GPT-4o (the 90-second demo is absolutely worth a watch!)
Scarlett Johansson Lawyers Up: A few days ago, actress Scarlett Johansson released a statement indicating that she had been offered by Sam Altman to be the voice for Chat GPT-4 back in September of 2023. For personal reasons, she declined. Now, nine months later, OpenAI unveiled a new system with a female voice called "Sky"...and guess who the voice sounds exactly like? Johansson says that Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, "tweeting a single word "her" - a reference to the film in which Johansson voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human". On the Sunday following receipt of a legal notice on the matter, OpenAI paused the use of the Sky voice. Since then, it has surfaced that OpenAI hired the voice actor and recorded Sky long before Johansson was ever contacted.

Takeaway

Upside down advertising economics for major news publications has led to endless layoffs in the sector globally.

Could AI licensing deals be their savior?

OpenAI now has content licensing deals with Reddit, News Corp, Politico, Axel Springer, the Associated Press, Le Monde, the Financial Times and Dotdash Meredith.

And that's just in the first inning of a much longer game to be played...

On the ScarJo front, we don't have all the facts yet but it does raise some questions for me.

At the end of last year, Altman was ousted by the OpenAI board of directors for his "handling of artificial intelligence safety, and allegations of abusive behavior".

He was able to quickly regain his position and now here we are today.

For someone running one of the (potentially) most impactful and influential companies the world has ever known, it's in our best interest that they have unquestionable moral character.

And at the moment, Altman seems to be repeatedly toeing the line...