How Google uses AI in search In 2022, we learned more about how Google was using AI in search – for understanding language for query, content and ranking purposes. The overview covered in what ways AI and machine learning helped Google Search perform its daily tasks. Specifically with: RankBrain Neural matching BERT MUM In short, RankBrain, neural matching and BERT were all used in Google’s ranking system across many, if not most, queries and look at understanding the language of both the query and content it was ranking. However, MUM was not used for ranking purposes. Read all about it […]

Google announced its Q4 earnings just hours ago, more on those numbers later, but Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, confirmed in the earnings call the search company’s plans to bring AI-like search features that “people can engage directly with.” Sundar Pichai said, “In the coming weeks and months, we’ll make these language models available, starting with LaMDA, so that people can engage directly with them. This will help us continue to get feedback, test, and safely improve them. These models are particularly amazing for composing, constructing, and summarizing. They will become even more useful for people as they provide […]

There are many quality SEO reporting tools on the market. Find the right SEO reporting tool for you and your team with this list. The post Top 5 Essential SEO Reporting Tools For Agencies appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

If you get Google’s Analytics emails, you may have already gotten the word. But ICYMI, Google has once again reminded us that Universal Analytics (UA) will stop processing data on July 1. What’s new is the email states that starting in March, any customer who does not set up a GA4 property with basic settings, Google will configure one with a few basic settings consistent with the existing Universal Analytics property; this includes certain conversion events, Google Ads links, and existing gtag or analytics.js tags. Opt-out. If you don’t want Google automatically creating GA4 properties for you, you may opt-out […]

Google’s parent company saw a 9% decline in revenue and 1% drop in Search revenue. CEO Sundar Pichai remains optimistic due to investments in AI. The post Google’s Q4 Report: The Challenges & Opportunities For Marketers appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Weak advertising demand and competition from TikTok and other rivals yielded lower fourth quarter revenue and profit for Meta, Facebook’s parent company.  Ad revenue was down 4% to $31.3 billion at Meta’s advertising-supported properties, including   Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Advertising revenue was 97% of Meta’s total revenue in the quarter.  Ad revenue in North America was flat, declined 16% in Europe and 3% in the Asia-Pacific. Revenue increased by 5% elsewhere (“Rest of World” in the table below).  The decline was attributed to “weak advertising demand, which we believe continues to be impacted by the uncertain and volatile […]

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

Dozens of Google’s raters, seeking raises and access to benefits, rallied at the Googleplex in Mountain View yesterday, with the goal of putting an end to “poverty wages.” Why we care. Google has said it uses as many as 16,000 raters – and about 5,000 are based in the U.S. As a group, Google’s human raters help ensure the helpfulness, quality and relevance of search results by identifying potentially harmful results, spam, outdated information and all the other elements that go into what is now known as E-E-A-T.  Protest in Mountain View. The goal was to deliver a petition, signed […]

Microsoft has revised its multi-channel strategy, which will be accessible for all advertisers on February 21st. Additionally, the audience ad bid modifier will no longer be visible in your campaign settings. Microsoft says “Instead of using positive or negative bid modifiers to manually adjust participation in the audience network, all you need to do is define your goals, and Microsoft Advertising will fully optimize your campaigns across channels. This will help you more easily manage your campaigns and find the best users in every auction to drive a strong ROI.” Driving new changes. Microsoft conducted research on accounts utilizing both […]

I’ll just come right out and say it… SEO should be a product because it is an acquisition channel for organic traffic and revenue.  SEO as a product largely means the business: Understands it operates in a digital-first world. Makes an effort for its digital properties (website, app, etc.) to be SEO-friendly. This way, when prospective customers are searching online using their devices, looking up through an app or initiating a voice search, the subsequent digital properties are discoverable.  In a nutshell, product management is a discipline of solving problems leading with customer empathy. While search engine optimization (SEO) is […]

CNBC reported the other day that Google is working on its own AI chatbot named Apprentice Bard. Apprentice Bard is reportedly built on Google’s AI LaMDA language model stack and while Google is being more cautious with this rollout, Google is working on testing an AI bot in search.

Google may be crawling the web with a new crawler, a new Googlebot, named GoogleProducer. This useragent is not listed on the official Google crawlers page but maybe it is too new to be listed yet?

Microsoft Bing posted a new blog post saying “for XML sitemaps, one of the most critical tags you can include in your sitemap is the “lastmod” tag.” And it will become even more critical as Bing is reworking its crawl scheduling stack to rely more on this lastmod field.

Google has updated the video indexing report within Google Search Console to add impression data and a way to filter the report by your available sitemaps.

Backlinks have long been considered a crucial factor in determining a website’s ranking on search. Historically seen as a vote of confidence, plenty of backlinks pointing to a website indicated that it is a trusted and authoritative source of information. And so, the more backlinks a site had, the higher it was likely to rank on search results.  However, in recent years, search engines shifted how the value of backlinks was evaluated. Google, in particular, with its sophisticated algorithms, now places less emphasis on the number of backlinks a website has – and more on the quality of those links. […]

This is how ChatGPT gets website data to learn from and how to block that from happening The post How to Block ChatGPT From Using Your Website Content appeared first on Search Engine Journal.