🤖 Will AI-Generated Content Ever Replace “Actual” SEO?

GM nerds,

Welcome back to the newsletter that’ll keep you far from the rat race and its Jimmys:

Here’s what’s good this week:

→ Brazil’s X Ban ❌
→ The DL On GA4’S Benchmarking Data 📊
→ Will AI-Generated Content Ever Replace “Actual” SEO? 🤖
→ OpenAI Valued At $125B, Claims It May “Never Make a Profit” 🤔
→ more, obviously 💬

But first…

​This Week's Video 🗣️🎙️​

In this week's video, I'm excited to share some significant updates and insights related to my YouTube channel. I've been experimenting with new features, particularly a membership option, which I believe will enhance the value offered to my audience. This new direction comes after feedback indicating a strong interest in more exclusive content. So, tune in for more details.

​YouTube​​

What’s Going Down @ Google 📊

→ According to the final results of this SEO poll on the August 2024 core update:

- 44% said My Rankings/Traffic Are Down
- 27% said My Rankings/Traffic Are Up
- 29% said No Change

That’s right— despite the verbal about how this update was geared towards helping small publishers, under 30% have seen that result.

→ Remember folks, I listen to Google’s SEO Office Hours podcast so you don’t have to. Maybe the most interesting part from the most recent episode was a question about whether turning YouTube video content into reproduced text content on your web pages has a negative rankings impact and is therefore seen as “duplicate content.”

The answer? No, the two forms of content are different and will not be treated as the same content.”

→ GA4 has introduced benchmarking data, with benchmarks refreshed every 24 hours. Having this benchmarking data available will let you use key metrics to compare your results against competitors across your industry.

→ Google is FINALLY supporting AVIF images in Search, making the format OK to use in WordPress. This is big news because AVIF lowers image size significantly and will boost Core Web Vitals scores such as Largest Contentful Paint.

→ This piece asks a bunch of news directors how they view AI Overviews, asking whether it will actually impact how digital outlets do business?

→ Core Update Update: some companies have seen consecutive weeks of doubled traffic, but are still down 87% from their 2023 highs.

AI Insight 🤖

→ Speaking of Google, new safeguards will be applied to many of its AI products ahead of the upcoming American presidential election, including Search AI Overviews, YouTube AI-generated summaries for Live Chat, Gems,,f and image generation in Gemini.

→ On the one hand, OpenAI is on the verge of a $125B valuation. On the other hand, its talking heads are now saying that investment in the company should be seen as a charity donation, and that it may “never make a profit.”

→ That’s wild, too, considering ChatGPT’s usage has doubled over the last year, with “92% of Fortune 500 companies are using its products.”

→ Even if nobody is enjoying Meta AI, apparently 185M people are using it monthly.

Social Media Round-up📲

→… Bracing you for maybe the most cringe-worthy development of the year:

Hide… run and hide.

→ Stuff worth noting does occasionally go down on LinkedIn, believe it or not. Like this heated debate after the author of “Author of Product-Led SEO” claimed: “Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO” and that “this mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”

→ Maybe the biggest news in the world of social media RN is that Brazil has banned citizens from using X with an “immediate, country-wide suspension” of the platform. With 22M+ users in Brazil, this is a massive move, and comes in the midst of a very contentious battle between the Brazilian courts and Elon Musk.

The court says the platform has allowed for “massive propagation of misinformation, hate speech and anti-democratic attacks.” Elon says the court is “squelching free speech and trying to censor conservative views.”

We’ll see what comes next, but losing 22M+ users for political reasons makes an impact, especially on a platform that’s already been bleeding advertisers.

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

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