January SEO News: ChatGPT & Google Search Developments

Gone is January along with the January blues. The start of the year is often where trends begin to take shape, algorithms shift, and new opportunities start emerging. Here’s a round of up key SEO updates from January and what they mean heading into February.

ChatGPT Updates

Ads Announced for ChatGPT

If you’re planning on asking ChatGPT for recommendations, don’t be surprised if an ad suddenly appears relating to your query. OpenAI have revealed their plans to introduce paid advertising to their free and Go tier subscription users.
Worry not, the ads will be complementary to the chat you’re having, and won’t affect the AI’s answers to your questions, the tech company have been transparent in the fact that they will not be selling user data or conversation history, instead linking ads to topics.

This update could be ground-breaking for advertisers and businesses being given the opportunity to promote products or services to a whopping estimated 800 million weekly users, with potential conversion rates being much higher than traditional organic searches.

Google Updates

Google launches Universal Commerce Protocol

A new advancement in Google’s AI adoption has shifted from being just informational searches, to shopping! The Universal Commerce Protocol allows AI agents to function across the whole online shopping journey, certain tasks can be automated like navigating websites and checking out.

So far, there have been sightings of this in action in the US (namely for Wayfair and Etsy), where users are presented with a prominent ‘Buy’ button while using AI Mode, the process from viewing to purchasing is simply 4 steps. Users will have the option to save their payment details to streamline the experience even further.

Speeding up the ecommerce experience has hopes of reduced cart abandonments as customers are able to buy as soon as they’ve finished researching. With this in mind, it’s essential for retailer sites to be AI agent ready. Having optimised product feeds with up-to-date information and ensuring websites are navigable using structured HTML and ARIA tags will help agents put forward businesses.

Engagement Drives AI Overviews

In recent news from Google’s VP of Product for Search, Google AIOs may not make as many appearances as we once thought… at least for now.
Robby Stein revealed that AI-driven results are being continuously tweaked based on how useful they seem according to user data, if users aren’t engaging with the content, then they’ll likely stop showing up. In terms of rankings, this is a leap away from the traditional way that marketers think; content now more than ever needs to perform for users to then be able to perform for machines.

This highlights how truly fluid the nature of AI search is and could make tracking appearances in AI Overviews difficult with a possible loss of ranking due to the fluctuating use of AIOs. The key is to ensure that content is optimised to benefit the user and keep the conversation going with FAQs and direct answers to queries, this makes it more likely that AIOs and traction to your content persists.

Google’s Year-end Crawling Report

Google has spoken and the year-end crawling report is in! Some interesting insights were shared as to why Google may be struggling to index pages on your site, and how you can resolve those issues.

The biggest issue by a mile appears to be with faceted navigation, with 50% of URL crawling difficulties coming from these filtered pages. This largely effects big ecommerce sites where the near-endless combination of filters on pages can create a long list of URLs when these pages are unstructured. You can prevent crawling issues related to faceted navigation by:

1. Block filter URLs from crawling
2. Use canonical tags to point filtered URLs to one main page
3. Use indexing rules/query parameter settings

Other issues include action parameters, irrelevant parameters, and problematic plugin URLs.

If you have a large site, keep your URLs in check to ensure that Google indexes your new content ASAP to maximise SEO performance and value. Healthy URLs establishes faster page speeds and a better user experience.

Organic Search Traffic Falls

Ding-dong the witch is not dead! Despite claims that SEO is on the way out, a large-scale analysis by Graphite using Similarweb data shows that the commonly reported 25% to 60% decline in organic traffic is dramatic, and the truth is instead a modest -2.5% decline YoY.

In fact, the numbers show that the largest (top 10) sites grew organic traffic by around +1.6% YoY, declines were mainly mid-sized publishers. Overall search engine traffic saw +0.4% increase, however less of those searches resulted in actual clicks. This can largely be attributed to the rapid expansion of AI Overviews across Google SERPS, the presence of which can reduce organic click-through rate by up to 35%.

What we can defer from these numbers is that Google is currently still reigning supreme in comparison to AI search. The migration to LLMs for answer generation is a slower process than thought, nevertheless it must be something to stay conscious of. Appearing in AIOs going forward is vital to ensure visibility across the entire search landscape, so keep content as optimised as possible!

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