Google’s artificial intelligence or AI-powered search engine is getting more upgrades three months after its first beta release. This new update includes three features perfect for students, learners or anyone researching a new topic or learning a new skill.
According to Google in their Keyword Blog, these new AI capabilities will “help you better learn and make sense of information on the web,” such as understanding difficult concepts, learning how to code and delving deeper into a complex topic.
Let’s take a look at these features in more detail below:
- Contextual Definitions: Google’s AI-generated responses will now provide a preview of definitions for unfamiliar terms that you may come across. Diagrams and images will also accompany the definitions so it’s easier for you to understand them. You can then click these context links to learn more about the term.
- Color-Coded Syntax Highlights: If you’re learning a new coding skill, Google’s SGE will now highlight and color-code coding segments on their overviews. This way, you can quickly identify elements, such as keywords, comments and strings, making it easier to digest code information right from the search engine results pages (SERPs).
- SGE While Browsing: Researching a complex topic can take hours, and this new feature aims to cut down those times. SGE will generate a list of crucial points inside a web page that you can click to navigate that page faster and find information more quickly. This feature is only available in the Google app for Android and iOS. However, Google promises this feature will grace Chrome for desktops “in the days ahead.”
If you’re a publisher with paywalled content, you don’t have to worry about SGE bypassing that. Google said SGE “does not provide key points on articles marked as paywalled, and publishers are in control.”
These new features come after recent updates in Google’s privacy policy and other upgrades here and here. Google also encourages more users to give feedback about their experience inside their AI-powered search engine, so if you have some thoughts about SGE, be sure to leave them.
Compared to their biggest competitors, Bing Chat and ChatGPT, Google’s new features allow for a more engaging AI experience beyond the main Search and Chat interfaces. And since Google Search has always positioned itself as a go-to resource for faster information retrieval, these features should enhance the overall user experience.
While the overall search engine optimization (SEO) implications are yet to be realized, we now know that Google has plans to bring quality traffic from their SGE content, so it’s crucial to make your website easier to read, crawl and navigate.
For example, the SGE While Browsing feature might not work well with websites with unclear structure and navigation. Similarly, SGE’s context links are less likely to point to your website if your definitions are not helpful for users based on E-E-A-T guidelines.
Following SEO best practices is still the way to go, as Google’s AI content policy (and maybe a help document on how their SGE algorithms work) has yet to be released.
Read Google’s full rollout announcement here.
More SEO News You Can Use
AI Content Is Rehashed Content: Google Expert: While that sounds like bad news, Search Advocate John Mueller just clarified how Google sees AI-generated content: “By definition (I’m simplifying), if you’re using AI to write your content, it’s going to be rehashed from other sites.” This comment can be found in a Reddit thread that discusses why a site isn’t earning backlinks despite excellent technical scores. He explained that “you first need that foundation of purpose” so people would link back to your site. This means having a clear purpose and value proposition many users may miss out on. While using AI-generated content isn’t inherently wrong, what you must do is produce content that is not found anywhere else. That’s the only way to make your website “linkworthy, recommendation-worthy.” Read the entire thread here.
Google Ads Gets AI Assistant for Its Help Guide: Select users received invites to try out Google’s new AI tool for their Ads platform as shared by PPC marketer Julie F Bacchini. Currently in open beta, this tool can “solve problems relating to Google Ads” through AI-generated content. But like any generative AI tool out there, this is still prone to hallucinations and inaccuracies, which is why Google is soliciting feedback from its beta testers. If you want to look at this feature, check out this article from Search Engine Land.
Google’s Ranking Doesn’t Use Third-Party SEO Scores: Just a few days after Moz’s new Brand Authority metric, many people are curious about how these third-party tools affect your rankings. The answer is they don’t… at all. In their August 15, 2023 episode of Ask Googlebot, Mueller said, “It doesn’t matter whether it’s about a website’s authority or a rating about spamminess; Google doesn’t use these scores at all.” However, he said that some of these scores are actually useful for estimating a website’s standing and pointing out real issues. While third-party tools and scores don’t directly impact your ranking, they still provide insights into your website’s performance in key areas, such as navigation, backlinks and even user experience. So, yes. You can still use them to learn more about your website, fix issues and optimize performance. Read Search Engine Journal’s article for the whole story.
Social Links To Come in Google Business Profiles: We’re looking at an upcoming feature in Google Business Profile (GBP) right now: social links right inside your profile. This is after Google added a new help document that outlines how users can add social links to their profiles. However, the feature is not yet available for all regions, so we must wait and see when this will be rolled out. According to Google, here are the social media accounts you can currently link to GBP: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, X or Twitter and YouTube. Google can also automatically add social links to your profile, which you can edit or remove. This is great for businesses leveraging Google’s local pack and local SEO to drive traffic. Now that you can add social links, your leads can easily find out more about you through your social media accounts. Check out Search Engine Land’s article for a full read.
Bing Chief Says Their Chatbot Beats Raw GPT-4: If you’re using Bing Chat, you may notice some performance gap between the tool and ChatGPT’s raw GPT-4 model. One user pointed out on Twitter that, at times, Bing Chat outperformed GPT 4. Bing CEO Mikhail Parakhin replied: “It is outperforming according to our measurements, too.” He cited that this is because, unlike raw GPT-4, Bing Chat uses a retrieval-augmented interface and multiple model calls and Search calls. However, this performance boost doesn’t come without a cost. Parakhin admitted that Bing Chat “ends up pretty pricey,” which is why this offering is only used by a few companies at the moment. Here’s the full Twitter discussion.
Editor’s Note: “SEO News You Can Use” is a weekly blog post posted every Monday morning only on SEOblog.com, rounding up all the top SEO news from around the world. Our goal is to make SEOblog.com a one-stop-shop for everyone looking for SEO news, education and for hiring an SEO expert with our comprehensive SEO agency directory.
