💰 Weekend Update: Perplexity Finally Adding Ads

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that teaches you to understand the assignment:

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ Perplexity Finally Adding Ads 💰

→ Diving Deep Into SearchGPT 🤿

→ Does Bing Stand a Chance vs. Google 🤔

→ Core Update: Recoveries and Bankruptcies 🤯

→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In this week's video, I share a straightforward strategy that can significantly improve local SEO for businesses with physical locations. This method is applicable if you have employees and a legitimate office space. It doesn’t involve seeking reviews but focuses on a simple action that employees can take during their daily routines. Tune in for more details.

​YouTube​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ There’s def been a lot of volatility since the core update dropped— but, in some cases, it’s been hard to parse what can be attributed to the update, and what is the fault of the ranking bug. These comments from Gary Mueller on the matter don’t fully address it, but does say that you should “wait until the core update finishes rolling out to make any call about its effect.

→ ICYMI: the story of a site whose traffic quadrupled the day they announced a HCU-related bankruptcy.

→ For some content and commentary on how the core update is impacting AI overviews, click here, or here or here.

→ Obviously, I’m gonna hate on Google, and be right about it, but it’s worth noting that the core update has already generated some recoveries:

Worth noting that it’s expected to take a full month to roll out.

→ Is Bing a serious threat to Google? Not really, but it’s still worth noting that articles are starting to ask questions like “Google vs Microsoft Bing: Which search engine should you focus on?”

This article compares the two side by side in terms of General Functionality, AI Functionality, Size Of Index And Crawling, Differences In User Interface & Tools, and more, with some interesting results. For example, Google’s US market share fell, while Bing’s rose. Now, the “fall” was from 88.88% to 86.58% YoY, while Microsoft’s growth was from 6.43% to 8.24% YoY. But still— a trend is a trend, right?

A practical point worth noting is that “Bing may have a leg up on Google by providing higher-quality images,” contributing to the conclusion that Bing may have an unexpected edge “particularly in visual search, social signals, and certain niche markets.” Still, one gem from the article puts things in perspective: “of the Top 100 Bing searches globally… the #1 query searched was [Google].”

Social Media Round-up 📲

→ This comparative study about “social shopping likelihood” determined that 44% of respondents would be likely to purchase a product directly from Facebook, while YouTube's number was 39%, and Instagram (29%), TikTok (26%), and LinkedIn (19%) trailed behind. All of these were at least marginal gains from Q1 to Q2, while X was the only major platform to drop (from 19% to 14%). Oof.

→ Reddit’s evolution into a major marketing platform keeps rolling along. The platform’s ad revenue is expected to hit $1.1B+ in 2024. The secret? Reddit seems to be getting the attention of advertisers because of its unique capacity to use interest-based, subreddit-informed targeting— rather than personal data.

→ LinkedIn is making a push toward video, as uploads on the platform are up 34% year-over-year. The new video carousels “provide you with an expansive, side-scrolling display of video clips.”

→ Meta has finally activated cross-posting to Threads from Instagram and Facebook.

→ There’s not much info on this yet, but it also seems like Threads is testing ad formats for the app.

→ YouTube is officially the #1 podcast-listening app, followed by Spotify. So long, Apple.

AI Insight 🤖

→ BrightEdge’s guide to SearchGPT unpacks how OpenAI’s new search engine works, diving deep into its features (AI-Powered Summarization, Conversational Interface, Real-Time Information Access, etc.) and interface, explaining how it cites sources, and comparing it to the other major AI search engines.

→ Perplexity is finally becoming relevant to advertisers, as it is on the verge of starting to sell ad space alongside AI-assisted search results. Click through to see the pitch deck that Perplexity has been sending around, which boasts of the platform's reach and app download numbers. Selling points include: “80% of Perplexity users have an undergraduate degree,” while 30% are in a senior leadership position, and 65% are in “high-income white-collar professions.” Beyond that, the app has seen 2M+ downloads and 230M monthly users.

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

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