😬 Weekend Update: Huge Google Ads Reporting Glitch / Data Breach

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that knows what’s good:

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ AI Overviews Ads Coming Soon 🤔

→ The DL on OpenAI’s Search Competitor 🤖

→ The Latest on TikTok and Reddit Marketing 👀

→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In this week's video, I discuss a local SEO case study that will focus on a catering company in London that specializes in Indian food delivery and catering. The goal of this case study is to show a step-by-step process for making 1K a month through performance-only local SEO. The case study will also cover various strategies such as optimizing citations, CTR, natural reviews, tiered Kevin's PBN, and local guest posts. So buckle up and get ready to join me on this exciting journey.

​YouTube​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ Pretty massive Google Ads reporting glitch has come to light over the last few days, with a data breach going on for weeks. At the time of writing, Report Editor, Dashboards, and Saved Reports in web interface are fully down; Products, Product Groups, and Listing Groups pages across web, API, and Google Ads Editor have been impacted; and the Data Breach has meant Unrelated item IDs, product titles, and Merchant Centre information are visible to competitors.

For more commentary on this issue, this article, “A Google Ads Glitch Likely Triggered A Data Breach Within Google Merchant Center,” is worth a read, explaining how exactly Ads has been “accidentally cross-pollinating data – including unencrypted customer and product info – between accounts on the platform going back at least two weeks.”

→ 3 new AI-powered features for Search just dropped:

- on desktop, Chrome browser users can instantly use Google Lens search to launch queries based on whatever they see on-screen.

- new integrated product listings featuring AI-generated product comparison tables

- an option to access specific pages from your Search history using conversational queries, ie. "What was that ice cream shop I looked at last week?”

→ Confirmed by Google: robots.txt does not protect websites from unauthorized access.

AI Insight 🤖

→ This piece on Apple’s Q3 wrap-up delves into how the tech giant is prioritizing AI but still struggling re: monetization: “Apple is struggling to explain how it will monetize the new technology — and what the timetable is to realize a return on investment.”

→ For the most recent take on “Best Practices” re: Mastering AI in Search, here’s the TLDR;

Optimize for: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and other public LLMs, and ChatGPT when it connects to the web / when it relies on its self-contained training.

There's also some guidance on how to adapt SEO KPIs to the rise of AI and LLMs as well as a bunch of other tips like “focusing on content quality and relevance,” ”using digital PR and off-page SEO to build brand authority and trust,” and “preparing for branded content strategy shifts.”

Click through if you want the details.

→ Originality.AI did a bot-blocking analysis and concluded that 14 of the top 1000 sites are blocking its crawlers.

→ The AI Act is the world’s first major AI law. Click through to see what it might mean for U.S. tech giants.

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ Reddit continues its grandstand against various Search engines and AI platforms, including Microsoft. Basically, until these platforms pay up on a lucrative licensing deal, the CEO of Reddit is vowing to keep blocking them from crawling its content using robots.txt.

→ Speaking of Reddit, the platform has also acquired Memorable AI in an effort to “build its own version of Performance Max.” Memorable AI, FWIW, is a tech that “specializes in tailoring ad creative based on an advertiser’s previous campaign KPIs.” Basically, the software gives advertisers data-driven feedback on copy, images and video, offering suggestions for improving creative to drive whatever metrics you choose. It does so by looking at data from past campaigns.

Reddit continues to go big on both AI and advertising, and this move is part of a strategy to get itself more firmly in the ring with Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok, and all the other giants.

→ LinkedIn’s Q4 Press Release boasts all sorts of gains in revenue, operating and net income, earnings per share, and more. Most importantly, there was "record engagement.” A couple interesting insights: “1.5 million pieces of content are shared every minute on the platform, and video is now the fastest growing format on LinkedIn, with uploads up 34% year-over-year.”

→ Is the impossible actually happening, and Threads actually gaining growth momentum, or are Zuck & co. just glazing the app in their recent earnings call? Well, the platform is about to hit 200M monthly active users, and Meta’s de-emphasis on politics is seeming more and more appealing to many users who want to escape X’s tendency toward extreme political posting from all sides, from racist uncles to hyper-woke teen activists.

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

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