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Google VS Chat GPT Taste Test:  

In blind testing, users appear to prefer ChatGPT search results over Google by almost 2:1. Those are the findings of the test's creator, ClickPop, which requires some caveats. Nonetheless, the outcome suggests the Google brand and familiar UI may be a bigger factor in Google's dominant search position than search quality

Google Ad Liaison provided bad pruning advice to CNET: 

 CNET was "busted" by Gizmodo this week for pruning a bunch of old content. The search liaison for Google came out and said: "Hey, you shouldn't do this. You shouldn't prune your content. The notion that Google doesn't like old content is just wrong". 

The takeaway from the comment is intended to be "don't prune content", which is a piece of very bad SEO advice. It sounds like CNET is, has a really good SEO team that clearly understands what they are doing. They noted: "Removing content from our site is not a decision we take lightly. Our teams analyze many data points to determine whether there are pages on CNET that are not currently serving a meaningful audience. This is an industry wide best practice for large sites like ours", whatever Google might say.

Consumers indicate that reviews are important but do they read them? 
Our user research in YMYL local categories continues to show that reviews are incredibly important to reviewers; it is the single most mentioned criteria and probably influences even those searchers that don’t mention it.  Yet very few people actually seem to read the reviews and primarily look at the rating stars and secondarily at the quantity. This should be a clarion call for the FTC to ban any review incentives rather than require that they be labeled. 

The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.
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