SEO News #7/2024

July brought a lot of discussions in the industry, from controversies surrounding algorithms through more or less expected business decisions by tech giants to aspects related to sustainable development.

The topic of cookieless became a significant trend in the digital marketing industry some time ago — specialists had many concerns about how the lack of cookies would impact targeting capabilities and where the boundary between content profiling and user privacy would lie. The idea of Cookieless World was to move away from cookies in web analytics to improve user privacy. Cookies, or files that allow identifying that two visits to a site belong to the same user were a direct target, particularly third-party cookies, such as those from Facebook or Google, which enabled profiling based on visits to various domains and monetizing that information (via Google Ads or Facebook Ads). Google was working on a new solution that guaranteed both user privacy and valuable data for advertisers — Privacy Sandbox. It took some time, and in the latest statement from the creators of Privacy Sandbox, we learned that third-party cookies will not be phased out; instead, another solution will be developed.

Source: Privacy Sandbox Update

If you closely follow Sam Altman’s (CEO of Open AI) actions, you might recall his not-so-recent statement to Business Insider, where he said he doesn’t plan to create another Google clone because… it’s boring:

Anyway. On his Twitter sometime later (May 10), he posted that he would present something entirely new to the world, but no, it wouldn’t be GPT-5 or a new search engine. And indeed, back then, we only saw updates to known features of the popular AI tool.

Two months passed, and a new topic surfaced, causing quite a stir online: Open AI will indeed be testing functionalities related to web search by launching SearchGPT. So, competing with Google is in full swing. What will the new search engine be? An alternative to Google Search and more. There will be linkages to sources, automated responses, and collaboration with creators and portals. And don’t worry – apparently, “highlighting high-quality content” is still the most important!

If you’re curious about what SearchGPT will look like, you can sign up for the wishlist on the Open AI website.

Source: OpenAI SearchGPT Prototype

We know well that companies strive for so-called carbon neutrality largely for PR and marketing purposes; recently, it has also sparked quite a bit of controversy that instead of reducing their emissions, companies are buying so-called carbon offsets, which are supposed to balance their environmental impact — at least on paper. But back to Google: as seen in the chart, until 2020, investment in ecology was going very well, but since 2021, the goals no longer match reality — and it’s only getting worse. It’s not that Google’s emissions stopped decreasing; no, they started to rise.

It turns out that investing in AI increased Google’s emissions by… 50%. Therefore, emissions are rising instead of falling — apparently, the ecological trend is not as beneficial for the image as investments in artificial intelligence. Sorry, environment, you’re no longer a profitable subject!

Sources:

Fortune on AI and Google’s Emissions

Google Ditches Carbon Offsets

In a discussion on LinkedIn, Google (or, rather, John Mueller on behalf of Google) responded to complaints about the lack of image thumbnails in search results. Mueller suggested waiting for the upcoming core update, which should resolve this issue. However, he emphasized that he couldn’t promise specific changes or a date for the update. As for the thumbnail problems, Google closed the complaint thread on the forum, informing that the issue “is still being analyzed.”

So, are you ready for another rollercoaster with the core update?

Source: LinkedIn Discussion