Microsoft claims its attempts to sell Bing to Apple were blocked by Google.
The tech giant’s CEO of Advertising and Web Services, Mikhail Parakhin, said he offered Apple more than 100% of the revenue or gross profit to make Bing its default search engine – but the proposal was rejected because of the company’s deal with Google.
Speaking at the federal antitrust trial, Parakhin alleged this was despite Microsoft offering to pay Apple more than Google – which he claims was offering in the region of 60%.
How much did Microsoft offer Apple? Tinter didn’t reveal exactly how much its offer to Apple was worth, but it was enough that the tech giant would have sustained a several billion dollar loss as a result. Tinter explained the company felt the short-term loss would be a justified investment because of the importance of default search engine status.
Why we care. Apple’s decision to reject Microsoft’s higher monetary offer for Bing as the default search engine implies that the Google deal might not be solely based on financial considerations. This could reinforce Google’s argument that it’s preferred for its superior product. Nevertheless, it underscores the significance of default status for search engines, as Microsoft was willing to incur a significant loss for the position.
Better offer than Google. While Tinter didn’t provide the exact dollar amount Microsoft offered Apple, he asserted that Microsoft was confident it presented a superior deal compared to Google. He explained: “That’s based on our best estimates of the revenue payments that Google was making to Apple in the United States.”
Samsung also shut down potential sale. Tinter went on to reveal that Microsoft had also tried to pitch Samsung about making Bing the default search engine on its products. However, he claims these conversations were shut down by the tech giant in their early stages.
Tinter allegedly urged Samsung to at least allow Microsoft to try and make an offer that could rival its deal with Google. But the tech giant told Microsoft that negotiations wouldn’t be worth discussing because of the company’s contract with Google.
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What has Microsoft said? Parakhin told the court at the federal antitrust trial:
"We were just big enough to play but probably not big enough to win, if that makes sense."
"The optimal thing for Apple to have done — and again, I think in closed session, maybe we’ll end up looking at some of the sort of math on this — would have been to have switched to Microsoft in the United States, taken our aggressive offer there, and continue with sort of Google in the rest of the world."
Deep dive. Read our Google antitrust trial updates for the latest developments in the courtroom.
Reddit is getting rid of the ability to opt-out of ad personlization based on users’ activity on the platform.
The change, which is being rolled out over the next few weeks, won’t increase the frequency of ads, but users can expect better targeted ads.
“Select countries” will still feature opt-out controls for Reddit users, however, specific locations have not yet been confirmed.
Why we care. This change enables Reddit’s models to better predict which ads may be most relevant to users, helping brands to reach higher-value consumers. Advertisers should prioritize reaching their target audience to enhance campaign effectiveness, improve cost-efficiency, and increase the likelihood of engagement and conversions.
Why now? In June, the platform’s CEO, Steve Huffman, told The Verge that monetization has become an increasing priority for Reddit: ” “Getting to breakeven is a priority for us in any climate.”
This change will enable Reddit’s models to identify relevant audiences more efficiently, enabling ads to be served to higher-value consumers, making it a more appealing platform for advertisers.
Specific category opt-out. Reddit is also now enabling its users to see fewer ads from the following categories:
Alcohol.
Dating.
Gambling.
Pregnancy & Parenting.
Weight Loss.
The platform explained it is using a combination of manual tagging and machine learning to classify ads. Although the change won’t be 100% successful to begin with, Reddit has said its accuracy will improve.
Toggle consolidation. In addition to the changes mentioned above, Reddit announced that it is consolidating two toggles so now there’s just one place to update your location preferences to help customize your feed and recommendations. It’s not certain if these settings will automatically impact post suggestions, and it’s yet to be confirmed if there will be an option to disable them.
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What has Reddit said? Reddit's head of privacy, "snoo-tuh" (Reddit does not reveal the identity of admins on the site), said in a statement:
"Reddit requires very little personal information, and we like it that way. Our advertisers instead rely on on-platform activity—what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals—to get an idea of what you might be interested in."
"The vast majority of redditors will see no change to their ads on Reddit. For users who previously opted out of personalization based on Reddit activity, this change will not result in seeing more ads or sharing on-platform activity with advertisers. It does enable our models to better predict which ad may be most relevant to you."
Deep dive. Read Reddit's announcement in full for more information.
TikTok has launched a new AI-powered tool to help advertisers create more effective campaigns.
Creative Assistant, which is located in the platform’s Creative Center, can be used to analyze data, offer suggestions, brainstorm ideas and provide advice on the platform’s best practice guidance.
Why we care. Creative Assistant can help make content creation easier and faster by acting as your virtual assistant. By leveraging TikTok creative insights, it can suggest data-led ideas to help you create more effective and engaging campaigns.
What is TikTok Creative Assistant? TikTok Creative Assistant is an AI-driven virtual assistant that you can chat with and work alongside while you create ads or videos for the platform. By harnessing TikTok-specific creative knowledge, it ensures you get the most relevant suggestions and guidance, ultimately helping advertisers craft compelling and effective content for their TikTok campaigns.
How it works. You can access Creative Assistant on the top right-hand corner of the Creative Center page when you log into the TikTok Creative Center. Start using the new feature by inputting prompts, such as the following:
“I am new to creating videos on TikTok. What are some best practices I need to know before starting?”
“Show me top-performing ads on Creative Center in the [industry] industry.”
“Come up with TikTok ideas for my brand named [name], promoting [topic].”
“Write a TikTok ad script for my [industry] brand named [name], targeting [market] and [target audience]. Highlight these benefits in the script – [benefits].”
What can you use Creative Assistant for? TikTok Creative Assistant can be used to boost advertisers’ creativity within the platform’s Creative Center, offering insights and suggestions for a smoother content creation process. Examples of instances to use it include:
For TikTok newcomers, Creative Assistant provides guidance on best practices and helps you kickstart your journey on the platform.
When researching the creative landscape on TikTok, Creative Assistant can display and analyze inspirational and top-performing ads using data sources available on the Creative Center.
When facing writer’s block, Creative Assistant is there to brainstorm TikTok ideas, assist in writing, and refine your TikTok scripts collaboratively.
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What has TikTok said? A TikTok spokesperson said in a statement:
"With Creative Assistant, you're now empowered to continuously create a meaningful and valuable presence on TikTok through never-ending ideation and brainstorm sessions."
"This tool means brands and creators worldwide can harness the power of artificial intelligence to better ideate and create TikTok creatives like never before."
"It’s important to remember that Creative Assistant is a launchpad for creative ideation, providing suggestions and playing the role of a collaborator in your creation journey. You are also always in total control, and have the option to use, edit, discard or redo the materials."
Deep dive. Read TikTok's Creative Assistant announcement in full for more information.
YouTube has confirmed the global launch of video view campaigns (VVC).
This new campaign type leverages AI to help advertisers target relevant audiences more efficiently and effectively by serving ads in the right place at the right time to drive interest and intent.
Why we care. Serving your ads to a more relevant audience optimizes campaign impact and efficiency, increasing engagement, leading to a better ROI. This approach ensures resources are used effectively and contributes to building stronger brand-consumer connections.
What is VVC? This campaign type leverages AI to strategically deliver the best-performing creatives to audiences more inclined to engage with the brand, helping to maximize views. VVCs combine a variety of formats to get the most out of a budget, including:
Skippable in-stream ads.
In-feed ads.
Shorts ads.
VVCs help advertisers achieve 40% more views and 30% lower cost per view than in-stream skippable CPV campaigns on average, according to a Google study.
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What has Google said? Julia Karr, Global Product Expert, Video, YouTube, said in a statement:
"Videos are one of the most impactful ways to tell a story, and VVC showcases your brand’s story across skippable in-stream, in-feed and Shorts ad formats.
"Warner Brothers Korea used VVC to drive user engagement, maximise views and drive ticket sales for the release of their new film 'Bones and All'. They found VVC to be an effective way to increase views and drive user engagement, with 33% more views and 36% lower cost when compared to TrueView in-stream alone."
Deep dive. Read Google's video views guide for more information.
The key to local SEO data is in its name – it’s local. Without it, a campaign may not receive crucial insights to adjust its central strategy.
If you’re targeting Manhattan, N.Y., but 80% of your users are visiting from devices in Brooklyn, N.Y., you’re missing something. But how do you find these gaps in Google Analytics 4?
Insights previously accessed through Universal Analytics are scattered across several dashboards in GA4, with new processes on the platform for filtering and accessing local data. Additionally, certain settings and configurations must be enabled to ensure local data collection.
A local SEO practitioner should regularly analyze information about organic user locations, behaviors, and landing pages accessed from search results.
Through these key reports in GA4, we can review organic data that reflects key local behaviors:
Demographic details
Traffic acquisition and user acquisition
Landing page
Library (custom reports)
Explore
However, none of these reports are perfect. Each report poses flaws and challenges that complicate our data. I’ll include troubleshooting tips and context for each report to ensure the data analysis is as helpful as possible.
A few crucial elements of GA4 impact overall local SEO reporting across these dashboards: the Organic Search filter and Thresholding.
‘Organic Search’ filter
For most reports in GA4, we’ll need to filter to organic search results using the Add filter feature at the top of the dashboard.
A filter column will appear on the right side of the dashboard.
Depending on whether sessions or users are preferred, we’ll choose Session default channel group or First user default channel group as the filter.
Select exactly matches, check Organic Search, and then click Apply.
This organic filter is used through most of our local SEO dashboards in GA4.
Thresholding
Google’s out-of-the-box reports often apply thresholding, indicating data is a sample.
The “Caution” symbol in this report indicates that Google is presenting an aggregate representation of our data rather than exact numbers.
In GA4, data thresholding is implemented across numerous key organic reports to anonymize users’ privacy.
Anonymization usually happens when something can be inferred about the user, like when there’s limited data or if the demographic information about users is too detailed.
For local businesses, individual location pages often receive fewer users since they’re a small piece of the total traffic count.
So, be aware that local SEO data is often an estimate rather than an exact count. We can use this data as a representation of overall user data.
Still, when the difference between compared data sets is >20 users or sessions, we probably shouldn’t rely on it to make major decisions about our strategy.
1. Demographic details
Where to find the data in GA4:Reports > User > User Attributes > Demographic Details
By default, this report lists where users visited by country, but we can change this by selecting the dropdown next to Country, and changing it to Region or City.
From there, we can see the top cities by user:
Why the demographic details report is useful
The demographic details report conveys the region or city where a user accessed the website.
We can compare this user location data with location page traffic or proximity-based rankings in a geo matrix tracking tool.
In the screenshot above, we see that the top cities visited by users in the United States are also some of the most populous: New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
We should make sure that local landing pages are set up for these locations, as well as key suburbs near these locations.
Issues with the demographic details report
With the right configuration, employee IP addresses will be excluded from GA4 reports, and their cities won’t appear on this dashboard.
However, if employees are required to use a VPN for work, it may prove trickier for the demographic details report to remain accurate. A VPN could anonymize employee data from cities worldwide, scattering location-based attribution.
Additionally, certain settings within GA4 must be configured to ensure that the tracking platform is collecting details about a user’s location.
To confirm that user location information is being tracked, visit Admin > Data Settings > Data Collection and ensure that Granular location and device data collection toggle is checked.
As previously noted, the Demographic details report will apply sampling, which means it won’t provide an exact count of users from each location.
Sometimes, these reports may include a row that says (not set), which typically happens because Analytics doesn’t classify the first event on the page as page_view.
An event like user_engagement might trigger prior to page_view, which isn’t supposed to happen but might relate to rendering issues on the website.
Overall, the solution to analyzing (not set) will require time to either configure a custom landing page report or adjust the website’s rendering issues.
These tasks are often high effort and low impact for local SEO unless there are large data discrepancies – i.e., 50% of the reported traffic is (not set).
2. Traffic acquisition and user acquisition
Where to find this data in GA4: There are two types of labeling for this dashboard, depending on whether GA4 was set up before or after April/May 2023:
Before April-May 2023
Reports > Life cycle > Acquisition > User acquisition
Reports > Life cycle > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition
After April-May 2023
Reports > Business objectives > Generate leads > User acquisition
Reports > Business objectives > Generate leads > Traffic acquisition
The Traffic acquisition and User acquisition dashboards both report on the types of marketing channels that drove traffic to the website: organic, paid, social, etc. However, GA4 has split them into separate dashboards due to a difference in data collection:
User acquisition: Only attributes the first visit from a user.
Traffic acquisition: Multiple sessions of traffic from the same user.
So, traffic acquisition will include a paid session for a user who clicked an ad one day and counts an organic session for that same user the next day.
User acquisition would attribute the user only to the paid traffic channel because it drove the first visit to the site.
Determining whether we should monitor user or traffic acquisition in local SEO depends on our goals for the campaign.
If we want to know about any time a user visited the site from organic search results, then traffic acquisition is a better fit. However, session-based data becomes complicated with brand and non-brand traffic.
If people find “Tom’s Dental,” as an ad and then visit the site, then they might remember this local business. A few days later, they type “Tom’s Dental,” into search results and click an organic result.
If a volume of users are selecting organic results with a branded search, this may result in an artificial increase in sessions on the Traffic acquisition dashboard.
In these scenarios, relying on the User acquisition dashboard to assess our local SEO growth might be more accurate.
Why the user acquisition and traffic acquisition reports are useful
These dashboards closely resemble the Channels report in Universal Analytics and are a great starting point for determining whether local organic traffic has improved.
In local SEO, data within these dashboards can provide insight around:
UTM parameters from Google Business Profile.
Filtering to our location page paths to assess organic traffic.
For simplicity, examples will be from the User acquisition report, but the same filters and adjustments can also be applied to the Traffic acquisition dashboard.
UTM parameters
UTM parameters are added to the end of a business URL in the Website field on Google Business Profile.
Because the source in the screenshot was specified as GoogleLocalListing, we can differentiate standard search results (google / organic) from GBP clicks (GoogleLocalListing / organic).
We see that in a 28-day period, traditional search results received slightly more organic traffic than GBP. This data might indicate that we need to improve our rankings in the Local Pack.
Location pages
By filtering our location pages, we can understand which locations receive the most organic traffic.
Using GA4 to compare the success of our various location pages is crucial to a successful local SEO strategy because it helps us determine priority.
When we have 50 locations but only a few hours to commit across them, it’s most impactful to dedicate our time to the locations most need growth.
First, add a column to the table dashboard that specifies Landing page + query string:
Click the “+” to add a column.
Search for landing page and select Landing page + query string.
Next, use a filter to limit data to organic traffic and our location pages.
Follow the steps outlined at the beginning of this article for filtering organic traffic and add a condition for Landing page + query string to the path of your location pages.
Note: In order to analyze the success of location pages, they must have been organized within a parent path folder, which is typically something like this: https://ift.tt/MGbwhPr
If location pages aren’t nested within a parent path folder, then the Landing page + query string filter won’t work, and assessing local SEO growth will be more challenging.
Based on our filters, we can see that the top GA4 locations accessed by new users are Atlanta and Denver.
Our locations with the least organic new users were New York and Columbus, where we could focus our local SEO efforts moving forward.
Issues with the traffic and user acquisition reports
If you’re not seeing UTM parameters appear within these GA4 reports, confirm that GA4 can display this information by visiting Admin > Data Streams > Redact data.
Make sure that URL query parameters is not checked.
Additionally, GA4 sometimes has issues displaying the “campaign” UTM parameters.
If this happens, the campaign listed in the UTM parameter might need to be added as a custom dimension.
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Where to find this data in GA4: There are two types of labeling for this dashboard, depending on whether GA4 was set up before or after April/May 2023:
Before April-May 2023
Reports > Life cycle > Engagement > Landing page
After April-May 2023:
Reports > Business objectives > Generate leads > Landing page
The Landing page report is populated with session data, meaning that a landing page visit is recorded each time a user visits a site after 30 minutes of inactivity.
Why the landing page report is useful
The Landing page report is another way to access location page data, similar to the Landing page + query string filter in traffic and user acquisition.
However, the data in the Landing page report might be slightly different because it’s a set dashboard, so we don’t need to add the Landing page + query string column.
The table on the dashboard automatically sorts by sessions rather than new users.
Filters for Organic Search and Landing page + query string were applied to this data.
Because GA4 applies thresholding, estimates might vary across its out-of-the-box dashboards, probably because of our filters.
When comparing the Location pages dashboard with the filters in User acquisition, the order of top pages changes, with Denver receiving more sessions while Atlanta receives more new users.
If your website’s GA4 account was configured prior to December 2022, then the Landing page report might be missing.
Additionally, the out-of-the-box landing page report for these older GA4 accounts might conflict with a manually built landing page report.
4. Custom reports
Where to find this data in GA4: When working with any out-of-the-box report in GA4, click the Edit icon in the upper right corner of the dashboard to configure a custom report.
After setting the filters as desired, click Save and give the report an appropriate name.
To review custom reports, navigate to Reports > Library on the lower left part of the dashboard.
Why custom reports are useful
A user saves time by accessing the custom report rather than applying these filters every time GA4 is accessed.
Each out-of-the-box report explained in this article can be saved as a custom report. Here are some examples of what these might be called:
Users in California Cities
GBP Users
Sessions by Local Landing Page
Organic Location Pages
Ultimately, the custom reports filter is great if you regularly reference the same data within a set date range.
Issues with custom reports
The date range for a custom report cannot be changed. Data in a custom report will appear based on the selected date range when the report was first created.
If the date range is set as “Last 28 days,” then then last 28 days of data will always appear in the custom report.
So, if a custom report should reflect year-over-year organic traffic growth, then be sure to select Compare prior to saving the report. If a new date range is needed, you’ll have to build a new custom report.
Additionally, custom reports cannot be exported. Any of GA4’s out-of-the-box reports can be exported by clicking the Share this Report icon on the upper right portion of the dashboard, which can then be downloaded as a PDF or CSV file.
Based on these limitations, custom reports in GA4 seem to be designed as an ongoing reference, rather than a troubleshooting or deep analysis tool.
5. Explore
Explore is designed to address deeper GA4 questions that cannot be answered with an out-of-the-box report. It is less of a dashboard in GA4 and more of a data platform – each Explore report is a custom configuration.
For example, Explore is useful if we want to pull a report comparing demographic location data to our organic location pages.
In this example, we see that some users are visiting the website from Honolulu, HI, but there is no Honolulu location page on the website.
This data suggests Honolulu might fit our next location page well.
Combining demographic data with landing page data can give us deeper insights into the campaign’s next steps.
Dozens of reports like the example above can be pulled with Explore using the principles of the out-of-the-box reports. Still, these configurations are advanced and require additional time to learn the GA4 platform.
Uncover key local SEO insights using GA4
Overall, the out-of-the-box dashboards in GA4 can provide valuable insights for our local SEO campaigns. Here are some examples of questions we can answer with this local data:
Does my site need more location pages?
Which location pages need additional optimization?
Which GBP’s are driving the most organic traffic?
Is keyword growth for a location page driving traffic?
While GA4 is a useful tool for gathering these insights, we should not depend on it as our sole source of data.
Local SEO data from GA4 should be contextualized with other reporting data from Google Search Console, GBP Insights, geo-matrix tracking tools, and other keyword reporting platforms.
For example, if we see an increase in GA4 organic sessions for a location page, is this because of ranking growth or an increase in branded queries?
We can’t determine the source of growth until we cross-reference why users visited the page.
The new GA4 platform includes plenty of insights for our local SEO campaigns as long as we understand the greater context of our wins and losses.
Fall is here, and that means holiday sales are right around the corner.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the largest online shopping days of the year, with Cyber Monday 2022 breaking records with almost $12 billion in sales.
These consumerist holidays are huge opportunities for businesses to rack up sales, so it’s important to be prepared.
This article will focus on one specific aspect: paid search.
Having a well-built paid search strategy is critical for most growing businesses but can be a fantastic way to boost sales during key times of the year with promotions.
Promotions are a fantastic way to get your ads to stand out from the crowd on a normal day, but they’re a must on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Here are three ways to use promotions and discounts in paid search to help you boost sales and capitalize on the holiday rush.
1. Create new ad copy
The most obvious way to use your promotions and discounts in PPC is to emphasize promotions and discounts in a new set of ad copy.
Using multiple headlines and descriptions to get customers excited about your promotion is simple but takes more work than the other two options.
One caveat to consider when creating all new ad copy for your promotions is that you need to ensure the ads start and stop at the correct times. I recommend using the labels feature to automate this process.
Decide what ad you want to use before and after the promotion and label them appropriately. I call these ads “evergreen” so I know this is my standard ad that is always relevant.
You then need to create your ad. Once done, label them as a promotion and the event/year you’re running them so you don’t run into labeling issues in the future.
For instance, if I were to create ads for Black Friday 2023, I would label them “Promo – BlackFriday2023.”
Make four automated rules to enable and disable the ads at the right times. Let’s say in this example that you want the ads to start on 11/21 and end on 11/28 for Black Friday. Here are the four rules you would set up:
Disable all ads labeled “Evergreen” in the campaigns to which you’re adding the promotion. Set this to run once on 11/21.
Enable all paused ads labeled “Promo – BlackFriday2023.” Set to run once on 11/21.
Disable all ads labeled “Promo-BlackFriday2023.” Set to run once on 11/28.
Enable all paused ads labeled “Evergreen.” Set to run once on 11/28
Setting these rules up takes the stress out of launching and pausing promotional paid search ads so you can focus on crushing this holiday season.
2. Leverage promotion assets
One of the biggest hassles of advertising promotions is the time it takes to create sales-specific ad copy.
This isn’t a big deal if you only have a couple of campaigns in the account, but what if you have 200 campaigns and 50 different sales to promote?
If that’s the case (or even if it’s not), then promotion assets are for you.
Promotion assets are ad assets that allow you to highlight relevant promotions for your business without creating specific ad copy.
Assets are additive to your normal ad copy, so you’ll only need to create one promotion asset per promotion, and you can have them run at the campaign or account level.
Since creating new ads resets the performance data, promotion assets will allow you to add promotions without affecting your ad data.
Another benefit of promotion assets is setting the time frame you want them to run.
This eliminates the stress of going into Google Ads and manually pausing promotions once they’re over, which is especially useful during flash sales, where many products go on sale for a short period.
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What if you don’t have any specific promotions that you want to call out in your ad copy? Or, what if you always have generally cheaper prices than your competition?
This is where dynamic keyword insertion comes in.
Dynamic keyword insertion is a way for you to “automatically update your ads with the keywords in your ad group that caused the ad to show,” according to Google.
This enables you to easily tailor your ads to the individual user without having to create a thousand different ad groups and ad variations to match their search.
Let’s take a look at an example:
Imagine you own your own clothing business, and you want to promote discounted jeans in a paid search campaign. You decide that you want your ad to show up for people who are looking for “blue jeans,” “denim jeans” and “jeans” and you want the first headline to match the user’s search exactly.
To do this, you have two options:
Create a unique ad group for each of those keywords and tailor the ad copy to the respective keyword.
Use dynamic keyword insertion to have a single ad tailor to all of those keywords.
Instead of typing out “Buy Discounted Blue Jeans” as a headline, you can use “Buy Discounted {KeyWord:Jeans}” and the headline will dynamically change for each of the keywords:
Blue Jeans = “Buy Discounted Blue Jeans”
Denim Jeans = “Buy Discounted Denim Jeans”
Jeans = “Buy Discounted Jeans”
The headline will update with whatever user search includes the words “Jeans.”
The only exception is if the user search exceeds the character limit, the headline will default to “Buy Discounted Jeans.”
Crush the holiday season with effective paid search promotions
The holiday months are often a make-or-break season for small and large businesses looking to get ahead of the competition.
When utilized correctly, paid search can be that advantage. Using your promotions and discounts in tandem with paid search can make a huge difference during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
By using these tips to use promotions and discounts in your paid search strategy properly, you’re well on your way to a successful holiday season.
Simply put, FAQs became exclusive to certain kinds of businesses, and HowTos were demoted to desktop only, followed by the news they’re disappearing entirely.
This means the positive impact of ranking for HowTo rich results will disappear, and most of us aren’t authoritative enough to rank for FAQs. Those relying on them for quick wins must now figure out how to regain what they’ve lost.
While Google specifically calls out websites using structured data as being directly affected, we’ve seen the impact of the rich results demotion on websites that don’t even use it.
We must look at SERP features and how Google finds that information to understand why this may have happened.
The answer is they’re using easily identifiable HTML to populate rich results information (or at least something extremely similar).
For example, the above is a lovely featured snippet with HowTo steps from a page with zero structured data (checked with the Schema Validator and Rich Results Test).
But let’s go a bit deeper. Below is a SERP result with two results that look like pages using HowTo structured data.
However, the holder of Position 1 only uses some breadcrumb markup, whereas the result in Position 2 uses HowTo markup.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen stuff like this, with products gaining rich result features without the markup as far back as January 2022.
Why you should care
This update looks like it affected not only websites using structured data but also those that were very good at making easily identifiable HTML content and weren’t using structured data.
You’ve undoubtedly seen many changes following the August core algorithm update. But it’s possible you saw many of these long before Aug. 22, which is when Google announced the update was rolling out.
This suggests it is more likely the rich result change impacted you than the August update. Not to say both have not hit you, but if you can see changes in early August, you may want to keep reading.
The following graphs and stats are from Semrush, showing the last five months of SERP features results for one of our clients (on desktop).
Due to being an industry leader, they’ve always had a good amount of SERP features and presence at the top of search results.
In July, they owned over 1,200 People Also Ask positions. However, this dropped to about 750 in August (around -40%).
We noticed these changes before any chatter around the core update, and they pretty exclusively hit SERP features rather than the organic listings.
Below are the top 20 total keywords for the same client, and there’s only a difference of around 20 keywords lost from July to August.
The impact on the People AlsoAsk feature seems strangely high. However, these are present for many query types, especially where HowTo or FAQ results would be ideal.
In case you were wondering how the impact differed between desktop and mobile, here’s the same drop in SERP features on mobile and the corresponding total number of keywords in the top 20 (about 10 fewer in August):
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Let’s finally dive into recovery. Our aim here is to discover and roadmap the next steps.
Discovering your losses
Despite the differences between websites using structured data and those not, the recovery strategy will be similar. The first step is identifying lost or dropped keywords and their associated pages.
This will be a simple ranking or traffic comparison exercise. I use an SEO tool or Search Console and export data into spreadsheets to do some lookups, but feel free to go with your heart on this one.
Finding intent
Next, we will assess the intent behind the keywords that have dropped, ideally on desktop and mobile, but you can focus on one first.
I often use Semrush for ranking checks, so that’s where my data is from. But you could use any appropriate platform or language with specific intent in your keywords, such as:
“How”, “why” to discover informational queries.
Pricing or “for sale” for transactional.
Product types or brand for commercial.
“Near me” for navigational.
I’ve done mine using COUNTIF in a simple spreadsheet:
Given we're looking at recovery for informational content, we assume all keyword intent will be informational.
However, as you can see above, my client’s biggest changes have been around commercial and informational keywords.
This makes sense when the keywords seem focused around product types, “diagram” and “how to” queries.
Discover how the SERPs have changed
This is the most important step because it’ll give us our strategy for recovery.
The easiest bulk approach is to grab your target keywords, pop them into Semrush, see what SERP features are available and match them to intent.
See below for a quick snapshot of some keywords and their intent. It’s easier to manipulate this in spreadsheet form using the “Split text to columns” feature.
Our example keywords suggest we can focus structured data on the following alternatives or adapt content to different formats:
Images and image packs
Video
Featured snippets
Reviews
Local pack
Site links
Forming the strategy
Prioritize the strategy by the biggest losses and the easiest updates we can make to content.
From the example above, I could make these changes:
Provide more images, add structured data to images or add alt text.
Content review and update.
Update Google Business Profile.
Add trusted reviews to the website.
Create the content in video format.
I’ve focused on images and Google Business Profile for most of my content improvements as they’ll be the quickest and easiest to implement.
Still, I’ll earmark some others for more involved updates. Here’s my keyword recovery planned out:
Google's rich results update: A roadmap to recovery
The rich results update, as with many Google updates, has had far-reaching consequences than expected.
It’s hit several of our clients who never used structured data on their informational content, and it happened before the August core update.
To recover from this update, identify lost keywords and their associated pages, understand user intent, and adapt to changes in SERP features.
Google today announced a new “standalone product token,” Google-Extended, that lets you control whether Bard and Vertex AI can access the content on your site.
This seems to be the end result of a “public discussion” Google initiated in July, when the company promised to gather “voices from across web publishers, civil society, academia and more fields” to talk about choice and control over web content.
Bard is Google’s conversational AI tool. Vertex AI is Google’s machine learning platform for building and deploying generative AI-powered search and chat applications.
The announcement. In a blog post, Google said:
“Today we’re announcing Google-Extended, a new control that web publishers can use to manage whether their sites help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs, including future generations of models that power those products. By using Google-Extended to control access to content on a site, a website administrator can choose whether to help these AI models become more accurate and capable over time.”
What is Google-Extended. Google calls it “A standalone product token that web publishers can use to manage whether their sites help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs, including future generations of models that power those products.”
What Google is saying. The company said Google-Extended gives publishers “choice and control”:
“Making simple and scalable controls, like Google-Extended, available through robots.txt is an important step in providing transparency and control that we believe all providers of AI models should make available. However, as AI applications expand, web publishers will face the increasing complexity of managing different uses at scale.”
Robots.txt. You can use robots.txt to block Google-Extended from accessing your content, or parts of it. To fully block Google-Extended, add the following to your site’s robots.txt:
User-agent: Google-Extended Disallow: /
Why we care. We know 242 of the most popular 1,000 websites have already decided to block GPTBot, OpenAI’s web crawler, since it launched in August. Now you can decide whether your website should opt out of helping Google improve its AI products.
Google today is adding its About this result feature to the AI-generated answers in the Search Generative Experience (SGE).
What it does.About this result is meant to “give people helpful context, such as a description of how SGE generated the response, so they can understand more about the underlying technology,” according to Google.
What it looks like. Here’s a GIF showing how this feature works:
In this example, the description says:
“This overview was generated with the help of AI. It’s supported by info from across the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph, a collection of info about people, places and things. Generative AI is experimental and info quality may vary. For help evaluating content, you can visit the provided links.”
For individual links (soon).About this result will “soon” be added to individual links in Google SGE as well. Here, the purpose will be to give people more information about webpages that backup the SGE answers.
About About this result.Google launched About this result in Search in 2021. It was meant to help searchers learn more about a search result or search feature.
Why we care. While it’s felt like a struggle for Google to cite its sources in SGE and Bard, this highlighting of webpages and content seems like another positive step for highlighting the source from which Google is generating its AI answers.
Targeted improvements in SGE. Google is also working to reduce AI-powered responses that validate “false or offensive premises” in SGE. A “false premise” query is inaccurate or factually incorrect and something Google has worked to reduce in featured snippets. According to Google:
“We’re rolling out an update to help train the AI model to better detect these types of false or offensive premise queries, and respond with higher-quality, more accurate responses. We’re also working on solutions to use large language models to critique their own first draft responses on sensitive topics, and then rewrite them based on quality and safety principles. While we’ve built a range of protections into SGE and these represent meaningful improvements, there are known limitations to this technology, and we’ll continue to make progress.”
