’23 Begins with a Bang; ChatGPT Shakes SEO Industry

Google’s Counterpunch to ChatGPT in the Works

The alarm bells have rung, the calvary has been called and the battle has been joined. After a dismal fourth-quarter of 2022 that saw Google take a 34% hit in profits from the year before, the company is refocused on its core offering, search, in a big way.

With inflation worries on top of increased operating expenses, Google cut 12,000 jobs in January, as did other big tech firms including Microsoft, Amazon and Meta (Facebook) to varying degrees. And Google is taking a hit in one area it was thought to be invincible.

Here’s a prediction from Paul Buccheit, the creator of Gmail:

Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption. AI will eliminate the Search Engine Result Page, which is where they make most of their money … even if they catch up on AI, they can’t fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of their business!

What is Google up against in answering ChatGPT? Only the fastest growing Internet player in history, on pace to surpass TikTok‘s record of 100 million active users in nine months, ChatGPT has ripped through that mark in about 90 days.

According to various reports Google has over 20 AI products in development, a handful slated to launch within the next couple of months — including a new edition of their search engine with some chatbot functionality added.

Can You Block ChatGPT From Using Your Website’s Content?

The way ChatGPT delivers answers to user queries is by scraping every available site on the Internet for material, then storing that in a database that’s ready to piece together words and sentences for your answer. Can you block that from happening? Yes, absolutely. And it’s easy. Simply add two lines of code to your robots.txt file and boom! The ChatGPT bot is prevented from crawling your website.

Related: ChatGPT Launching a Subscription Plan ($20/month)

In what should be a massively popular offering that promises to take conversational AI to the next level, ChatGPT Plus is about to launch a subscription version — while the free version (which has a waitlist to use) will continue to remain available. It’s only in use in the U.S. at present but plans to reach other countries are in the works.

And It Gets More Interesting

Open AI has introduced a “classifer” app, which is trained to identify text written by humans or AI. The company admits the following: “Our classifier is not fully reliable. In our evaluations on a “challenge set” of English texts, our classifier correctly identifies 26% of AI-written text (true positives) as “likely AI-written,” while incorrectly labeling human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time (false positives).” Try it for yourself here.
 

Quick Hits

AI is Going to be a Jobs and Career Killer. Are You Safe?   While there is a debate about the impact of AI on the job market (some say as high as almost 50% of today’s jobs will be history), there is already evidence of the technology’s impact on the search and content creation sectors. Business Insider has published an interesting — and frightening — piece titled ‘ChatGPT may be coming for our jobs. Here are the 10 roles that AI is most likely to replace‘. Among sectors hardest hit are jobs in media, publishing, legal, finance, teaching and even graphic designers. This is a game changer.

WordPress Roundup

• What is GDPR and Why Does My Website Need It? GDPR stands for the General Data Protection Regulation, and is noted as the most stringent personal privacy law ever written. While conceived by the European Union, its reach is global and the penalties can be significant — up to 2% of a companies annual revenue. The good news for starters is that if your website is on the WordPress platform, the WordPress core software is GDPR compliant since the debut of WordPress 4.9.6 on May 17, 2018. But it doesn’t end there. If your website gathers any level of personal information from visitors — even something as simple as a first name and email address, seo57 can provide guidance to ensure your site is in full compliance. Drop us a line to schedule a call.

WooCommerce Roundup

• A Simple Reminder Why WooCommerce Rocks : By virtue of being built on the WordPress platform, WooCommerce busts out of the starting gate with uber-optimized SEO features. From search engine friendly URLs to custom metadata, the short answer is that while the many alternative ecommerce solutions are primarily focused on just that — ecommerce — WooCommerce gives equal attention to the ability to organize, optimize and analyze content like no other. It’s the smart choice for any serious online marketing venture. Have questions? Drop us a line and request a no-obligation phone chat.