Webcology

"Whispers from within, Nature's laughter fills the air, Gentle cheeks release.", ChatGPT for Chrome, 2023

It's been another week of extraordinary A.I. developments with plenty of examples of A.I. screw-ups, gripes, and fears as we surge forward figuring out how to best use and abuse the powers of A.I... Kristine Schachinger and Jim Hedger look at Chatbots in Search and talk about a few weeks of watching Google's Search Generative Experience roll out. One critic called Google SGE a plagiarism engine and another critique noted the lack of passion that goes into generating haiku poems about farts so we asked ChatGPT to generate a haiku about farts and it did create an original haiku about farts so ChatGPT winds that around.

We also talk about the loss of navigation in the final weeks of Universal Analytics, how Google might be forced to break itself up to do business in the European Union, how a blackhat super scrape netted $800K, and more...

The impacts of artificial intelligence are everywhere and we spend a lot of time talking about those impacts but we also got to talk about some regular Googley stuff too. Jim Hedger and Kristine Schackinger did start off on a high note, noting the reports of the death of a US Air Force member testing an AI-operated drone were greatly and completely exaggerated as it was only a simulation. Paraphrasing the words of the commanding officer, "... it was just a simulation. Only a madman would do that for real." Fun times!

We also talked a bit more about Sam Altman's fears of "... something really bad happening", but also talked about how Google is adding Implicit Code Execution to Bard and giving it the ability to export data to Google Sheets. Interesting times?

Best of all, we got to talk about Google glitches, the delicate art of SERP Composition, and the expansive myth of Index Bloat, and we try to answer the age-old question, "Can security headers help with rankings?" Bizarre times indeed...

Sometime last yesterday, word went out on Twitter and LinkedIn that one of the largest SEO conference in the world was coming to North America. Conference founder Kelvin Newman tweeted and posted his team was bringing the show over here in 2023 with a date and time to be announced in the coming weeks. We asked Kelvin to come on Webcology to talk about the experience and, what we expected to be a quick ten-minute promotion turned into a twenty-five-minute conversation about his experience organizing shows, how to pitch your ideas, the free ticket lottery system, and a host of other stuff.

We also walk through the enormous number of AI and SEO-related stories from the world of search including, 

• New AI-driven third-party plug-ins for Expedia, Kayak, Instacart, and others (https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-openai-web-browsing-plug-change-how-we-use-internet-2023-5)
• 22 best ChatGPT Chrome Extensions to try (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/chatgpt-chrome-extensions/485594/)
• Bing named the search engine of record for ChatGPT (https://www.seroundtable.com/bing-search-search-engine-chatgpt-35437.html)
• The opening of the first trial group in Google's new AI-driven Search Generative Experience (https://searchengineland.com/google-opens-access-to-search-generative-experience-today-427572)
• Google's not-so-new Topical Authority Ranking (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-news-topic-authority-ranking-system-35438.html)
• and more...

In what is possibly one of the most interesting and entertaining interviews we've recorded in a while, Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk with SEO legend Martin MacDonald about the development and release of the industry's first AI-supported SEO Auditing tool, Serpere.AI - https://serpere.ai/. 

Martin has been a practicing SEO since the dawn of the commercial Internet and has worked with some of the largest websites in the commercial sphere, including TicketMaster, Expedia, and Orbitz. Founder of MOGmedia, Martin has shared his findings and SEO data with the SEO community as a trusted source for over a decade.

Today we talk about AI's advancements in the tech sector, discuss the intricacies of conducting a large-scale website audit, and cover how AI has made Serpere much faster and more accurate and how its use of AI radically simplifies the reporting and explanation process. 

Google announced major changes to search results as artificial intelligence-assisted search becomes part of Google's information universal ecosystem (*except for Canadians, Germans, and a small gaggle of other unfortunates whose governments find themselves arguing with Google) 

In this show, Jim Hedger and Kristine Shachinger talk about the biggest announcements from Google IO and how coming changes will affect the business and practice of SEO. We discuss Google Perspectives, About This Image, Google Maps Immersive, Google Helpful, and a host of other Google search products and services that are or are soon to be directly influenced by AI-driven results sets. We also cover changes to Google's Core Web Vitals, and how the statement, "What does this bring to the existing information table?" is one of the best questions to ask when considering the true value of content. 

Geoffery Hinton is widely considered the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence. His research into human brain function in the late 1980s and early 90s at the University of Toronto prompted him and a team of early neural researchers to start to conceive of a digital brain that could learn. His work is considered the foundation of modern machine learning and large language models. He recently stepped down from his position as head of AI research at Google's parent company Alphabet so he could raise awareness of a terrible thing he can't stop thinking about. Ten months ago, an AI model Hinton was working with deciphered and explained the humor behind a joke. It wasn't necessarily a great joke but it was a series of complexities that built upon themselves to end in a twist requiring a leap of thought to understand. That the AI model was able to easily make the leap and understand the humor that made the joke funny astounded and terrified him. That was the moment he reckoned the rapidity of advancement since the beginning of his career in the late 1980s. What he thought would be happening several decades from now is happening today, faster and far fuller than he and other pioneers of AI anticipated. Last week, Hinton suggested he regretted much of his career. In this episode, Jim Hedger and Kristine Shachinger talk about Hinton's worries through a week's worth of AI news. We also talk about Hinton's extraordinary career and think about the advancements that can be made because of his work. We also talk about E-E-A-T, the coming of Google Analytics 4, Google's advice on canonicals for publishers, and Google's disavowal of disavows. We're still trying to get an interview with Professor Hinton. 

There was a lot of Google news to cover this week in a short break from our usual breathless coverage of the AI revolution. This week hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger discuss a number of Google and social media stories, along with thanking Search Engine Journal for including Webcology in the Top SEO Podcasts for 2023. This week we covered

• the growth of Spoutable
• Elon's Secret faux-minor Twitter profile
• Google Product Updates - GA4 is coming
• Google April 2023 Reviews Update done rolling out
• Google rewriting page titles in SERPs (again)
• and the bipartisan plan to limit social media access to ages 13 and over

Another AI-focused show. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk about the introduction of Auto-GPT, OpenAI’s newest product that can instruct itself. Jim, who has been a strong supporter of incorporating AI into our work process and tools admits to being a bit queasy at the prospect of a self-prompting AI. We also cover the development of Project Maji and Google’s new Search Engine, the introduction of a new Google web crawler, the removal of Page Experience from the Search Console, the sudden death of Buzzfeed News, and more…

A news coverage show that tried to focus on organic search with a lot of changes to report at Google. The biggest story this week has been the rollout of Google’s new Review Update expanding to cover reviews about products, services, and things. Hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger also talk about how a page or site’s quality can degrade over time, how schema triggers different types of SERPs, how the March 2023 Core Update might have affected local search, using ChatGPT for research, and the ongoing saga of strange going’s on at the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Like Elvis in a Mojo Nixon song, AI is everywhere man. This week hosts Jim Hedger and Kristine Schachinger talk through the confusing ways the SEO and tech industries are taking to AI. From hallucinated Guardian stories to a treasure trove of industrial espionage opportunities, this week

offered us a lot of lessons about being careful around AI.