The next HUGE source of organic traffic? 🤫

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 for you in June 👨‍🍳:

Google's 2,500 page data leak
Is TikTok the next big source of organic traffic?
Perplexity's bullsh*t machine

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Google News

Lowdown

In comparison to how we started the first half of 2024, June has been a relatively quite month for Google...

"The Leak": At the end of last month, Google confirmed that the 2,500 pages of leaked internal documents detailing the types of data Google is collecting is in fact authentic. The leak exposes over 14,000 potential ranking features, and gives SEOs an unprecedent look behind the scenes of the most influential algorithm in the world. One of the more interesting discoveries for niche site owners is that Google is specifically filtering for personal blogs and smaller sites. The question is why?
R.I.P. Continuous Scroll: Launched on mobile at the end of 2021 and on desktop at the end of 2022, continuous scroll was Google's attempt to expose users to more results than just the first 10 blue links on page 1. Despite their intent, a few days ago Google announced that "Loading more results automatically didn’t lead to significantly higher satisfaction with Search" and as a result continuous scroll will be retired on both desktop and mobile over the coming months. Back to the classic pagination...
June 2024 Spam Update: Released on June 20th, this can be classified as just a "normal spam update" and Google has not offered any further details. The update finished rolling out yesterday on June 27th and so far site owners aren't seeing much movement.

Takeaway

It's true that this data leak doesn't give us all the answers. Far from it.

Why they're collecting certain data and exactly how that data is being used to inform search can only be speculated.

But the one thing these documents prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that representatives of Google have repeatedly lied to content creators.

They've repeatedly said that click data doesn't matter. These documents prove otherwise.

They've repeatedly said that they don't have domain or site authority measurements. These documents prove otherwise.

The list goes on.

So when we all learned that Google is "flagging" personal blogs and small publishers, I don't blame anyone for thinking this is somehow an attempt to ubiquitously and indiscriminately place a negative classifier on niche sites.

As usual though, we will likely never know for certain.

As far as Google update chatter goes, it feels like this June spam update has been met with the least amount of commentary in years.

And sure, that's partly due to this being a relative nothing burger in comparison to the bombs that have been dropped on us as of late.

But I think it's also a clear reflection of current sentiment. So many site owners have been so beaten down they simply can't be bothered.

TikTok's External Link Experiment

Lowdown

Over the past couple of weeks, TikTok has been testing a new feature that allows links to be embedded directly in videos.

It appears the feature has been rolled out to just a handful of publishers at this time and TikTok has declined to comment further.

Takeaway

As Google and other popular social platforms continue to decimate traffic for content creators and small publications, this test comes at a very interesting time.

The virality and reach of TikTok is undeniable.

If creators could capture even a small fraction of the many millions of people these videos reach, that could end up being a pretty meaningful driver of organic traffic...and quickly.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. There are a TON of unknowns at this point.

Will this capability ever get rolled out to the masses? And if it does, will these links even convert? And if they do, what kind of user demographics will we see? Oh, and I almost forgot...will the US ban TikTok outright by this time next year?

For now there are more questions than answers, but absolutely a space worth monitoring over the coming months.

Perplexity's Secondhand Hallucinations

Lowdown

Advertised by CEO Aravind Srinivas as an AI-powered “answer engine", Perplexity is now coming under fire for being a bullsh*t machine.

Recent investigations have revealed that not only has Perplexity been using third-party scrapers who ignore the robots.txt code that explicitly asks web crawlers not to scrape the page, they've also been intentionally bypassing paywalls.

To make matters a whole lot worse, a recent report by GPTZero shows that in some instances, Perplexity is generating "answers" that are based entirely on AI generated content.

One such example cited in the report is a travel-related search to Japan with the prompt 'Cultural festivals in Kyoto, Japan'. The source Perplexity relied on to provide its response? A LinkedIn article that was 100% AI-generated.

Takeaway

In the AI-powered chatbot race to dethrone Google, Perplexity's main differentiator has been it's claim that it provides reliable answers that include sources and citations.

But "garbage in, garbage out" and in many cases, AI generated content is HOT GARBAGE that contains information that is completely made up.

Perplexity relying on AI-generated content to provide AI-generated answers is some dystopian shi*t and honestly scares the hell out of me.

The premium on vetted, high-quality, and trustworthy data sources has never been higher and I fully expect the valuations placed on future content licensing agreements to go exponentially higher.