Why These Google Updates Matter

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All right, so the new Google Developer Conference was not too long ago, and I mentioned it, and I want to cover a few things that came out of that. Number one, there is an update on like how to optimize your website for Google SEO and for AI, but there's also a bunch of just kind of smaller, not necessarily related updates, the things that Google announced that I want to go over today. These are some things that I think will be good, can be good for local business owners, and some things I just think you want to be aware of. But each of these is not necessarily big enough for its own episode. So here we

AI Image Detection And YouTube Labels

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go. All right, first, there's a new test for AI generated images. That is to see whether or not an image is in fact generated by AI. Technically, these are not new tools, but from what I understand, these have taken a significant step forward in how accurate they can be. And I think this is actually the first time that Google is actually releasing one of these. I will link to an article about it. It's not necessarily something that you have to do. It's not really related to SEO. But as a photographer, if you want to determine, you could probably spot AI-generated images a lot better than I can. But if you are curious, are your competitors using AI images or are you using AI images and want to know if they are identifiable? I hope you're not. You're probably this probably isn't even a thing. But if you want to play with this tool, I thought it might be interesting, especially for photographers. I will link to it below. And something else I thought was particularly interesting, again, not really related to SEO. YouTube is beginning to require videos that have AI people in them, in other words, actors as AI. It's requiring them to state that in right on the video, like put a watermark over the image to say, I forget what the phrase is. It's actually kind of funny. It's like artificial participants or something like that. And it may end up being something simpler. But uh also this is not new. The EU has been doing this. This is tending to look more like it's going to become a sort of legal requirement. Of course, that doesn't mean that nobody will do it, but it certainly means that that most big influencers and any companies are certainly going to want to follow any sort of legal requirement. So that's coming. I think that's cool. Something else. Now, this one does relate to SEO and especially to local business owners, and that is uh Google Gemini is somehow going to be connected to Google Business Profiles. Now, I don't know exactly how this is going to work yet, but it has been announced. And certainly, if I were a local business owner, I would want to be, or I would be curious about what that's going to be. Your Google business profile as a local business owner

Gemini Meets Business Profiles

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is massively important. So keep an eye out on that. That has not, like I said, I don't know what it's going to look like exactly. It's certainly, if it has rolled out to anybody, I don't see it in any of the business profiles that I manage. And something else, also related to SEO and AI, AI results are now going to be included in Google Search Console, specifically called out in Google Search Console. Currently, what I have been doing, and I think this is fairly accurate, you can get an idea of how often your site appears in AI by looking at the number of impressions and spotting any impressions that do not have keywords.

AI Performance Coming To Search Console

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That sort of indicates that it was an AI impression. However, moving forward, Google is going, they're going to have a, and this also has not rolled out into any accounts that I am managing, so I don't see this yet, but there is going to be an option on the left underneath performance that says something about your performance in AI search. All right, so those are just a few random updates from the recent Google uh Thingama Jiggy. Also announced at the Google Thingama Jiggy was an updated guide for how to optimize your website for SEO and more specifically now for AI. I'm going to be covering that in a totally separate and dedicated episode. But for right now, I want to go over a recent report that came out from a company called AHREFS, which is a company sort of similar to Semrush. They do a lot of similar stuff, but they are a little stronger in terms of research

Ahrefs Findings On AI Search Citations

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and kind of measuring and looking for what's happening in AI search. They just came out with a report uh after studying, I think like, I don't know, 40,000 thingamajigs. I don't know. But it certainly looked like a pretty comprehensive report. AHREFs is kind of a trusted source. So there's a lot of these reports floating around out there. Probably the majority of them are garbage. AHREFs is one source for, I think, uh pretty solid reporting. So I'm going to go over just a few things that it found that sort of illustrate how AI search is is changing and what's happening right now. The first thing, and this is relatively new, I think. This is kind of the first time this has been reported, uh, that word count does not matter for AI citations. So what that means is longer pages don't tend to surface more often in AI generation in AI searches. This is kind of not what we thought previously. Now, by longer pages, what it was measuring is pages that are under a thousand words, which you might think, well, that's a pretty long page already, and I wouldn't disagree. So this tip might not be as actionable. But if you are generating blog posts regularly that are one, two, three thousand or more words, uh, you don't, and thinking it's good for AI, which is what a lot of us have been thinking until now, it looks like that's not necessarily the case. If you were at a thousand, a thousand words for a blog, say, you don't feel the need to make it any longer for SEO or AI purposes. If it needs to be longer because you're making it more resourceful, yeah, do that. But you don't need to aim for blog posts that are, say, 2,000 words or more, you know, just for SEO and AI purposes. The other thing that uh I thought was interesting, not really surprising, but interesting, is ChatGPT sends almost no traffic to websites compared to Google and Gemini. And the numbers that they used here are ChatGPT is getting roughly 12% of the total search volume that Google is. What that means is people are using ChatGPT to search for stuff about one-tenth as much as people are using Google and Gemini to search for stuff. That's just how many, that's just how popular it is for people making searches. So Google is roughly 10 times more popular, but sending 190 times more visitors to websites. And the reason for that is ChatGPT in particular, they just want to keep you in the conversation. They don't want you going out anywhere else, whereas Google's objective is to, and this is their stated mission is to help people find helpful information as quickly and accurately as possible, and then send you to wherever that is you want to go. Whereas ChatGPT's objective will be to never send you anywhere. ChatGPT will eventually start, I'm sure this, trying to figure out ways where you can just buy stuff directly through ChatGPT, never having to go to a website. Google will probably also do that, but I have a pretty strong feeling that the way that Google does it, the ethics behind it, is Google is going to be a little more trustworthy in how they do it. That's just my bet. And I think that's a pretty good bet. Okay. And when people search for things to buy, this is another point along the same lines, especially using ChatGPT, roughly half the time, ChatGPT just cites examples from a, you know, best 10 toasters type of blog, which is almost always going to be an affiliate blog. This is going to matter for local photographers because if you can get onto lists like that, and if somebody does a search in ChatGPT, say, what are the best photographers near me or in my neighborhood? Chat GPT, 50% of the time, half the time, is just going to look to those types of lists to get a result. So my recommendation, if you see those lists, try to get on those lists. It's much less likely to be an affiliate program with a photographer as there is people buying toasters. So there probably won't be any sort of affiliate relationship you're going to have to worry about. But anyway, my point, if you can get onto those lists, probably a good idea. And then the final point from this report that I thought was really interesting is that websites being cited in AI searches are becoming less likely to be like, say, in the top 10 results of Google. So not that long ago, if you did a search for anything on AI, you kind of got a summary of the first 10 or maybe 20 websites on Google. The trend, however, is moving away from that. So AI is looking a little deeper into search engines. AI still uses search engines. Whenever you look for something current, AI is going to use a search engine to find it. But AI is getting better at looking through more results and giving you something more specific to what it is you search for. And I've talked about what you want to do with that, like as a website owner, what you want to do to have your website cited more often. I've talked about that before, things like formatting your content, using questions as subheadings, and then answering those questions right away in the body of your content. If you want more tips like that, try joining my insider's newsletter. The link is below. I send out tips monthly on things like this and make announcements. I'm going to have an updated AI plus SEO crash course coming up that details all this stuff.

Practical Takeaways And Next Steps

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And insiders will get advanced notice and access to that. Otherwise, I hope this helps.