SEO News Digest: Local SERP experiment, SGE goes live & other highlights from Google I/O, and GPT-4o release

It's been a while! This week brought us plenty of topics to discuss. Let's dive right in!

Updates

• The anticipated second wave of the spam update has begun

But it’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s cat situation—it has and hasn’t started at the same time. Google is deliberately not rushing to notify us about anything, even though sites have already started getting penalized.

When asked why the update hasn't been announced on the dashboard, Sullivan replied that only manual actions are currently being issued, while the algorithmic part hasn't begun yet.

On the bright side, there are already cases where manual penalties have been successfully removed from sites, leading to their search visibility being restored.

To recap, this “part” of the Spam Update concerns the Site reputation abuse policy, which Google announced in March along with Scaled content abuse and Expired domain abuse. Another point that must be mentioned is that Google has recently emphasized that Site reputation abuse isn't about linking; it’s about using another domain's reputation for your own benefit.

Interface

• Product review summary labels

Brief highlights of product features on review cards.

• (to come) Number of shoppers next to site

Google plans to display the number of recent shoppers on your site in its search results. We’re talking about labels like "1K shopped here recently," data on which will be pulled from your Merchant Center. 

The idea is to "build shopper confidence in your business."

However, many users are unhappy with their sales stats becoming publicly available even in this format. For such users, Google provides an option to opt out. But keep in mind that even then, Google will continue to use your data "to power various annotations and features that benefit your performance."

Local SEO

• (test) Only local listing for ‘near me’ queries

In an experiment, Google is showing only GBP listings for “X near me” queries. Not a single traditional snippet leading to websites.

Tidbits

• Yesterday’s Google I/O presentation

The search giant has announced their new developments related to AI.

Here’s what stood out: SGE is finally going live this week under the name AI Overviews. For the time being, it will only be available to users in the US “with more countries coming soon”.

Danny Sullivan claims that the feature has almost fully been rolled out. He also mentioned that people use search more when this feature is available, and are ultimately more satisfied with the results. And all of this comes despite SGE’s earlier advice suggesting that users drink urine to treat kidney stones.

Oh, well.. ;)

A number of other new features were announced, which will be available only for the US market in English through Search Labs:

• Ask complex questions that require multi-step planning like trips.

• Interrupt answer generation to refine or modify your query.

• Plan ahead, like meal plans for three days.

• For broad queries, AI will group results into subcategories (see example for clarity).

• Google Lens will now work not only with photos but also with live videos—you can film something and ask questions about what's in the frame.

I must mention that OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman decided to steal some of Google’s thunder by releasing a new product that “feels like magic” just a day before the search colossal’s I/O.

Everyone speculated about what it might be—a search engine, a voice assistant... Altman said that the team has been working extra hard on the update, and it turned out to be quite the gem.

• The super product turned out to be GPT-4o

What makes GPT-4o so gosh darn fantastic?

The big news is that the team over at Open.AI has improved its multimodal voice assistant. Now it clearly understands text, photos, and videos.

Moreover, you can talk to the model in real-time, get it to translate conversations, understand and explain code, share your camera and ask questions about what’s in the view. To boot, I was just blown away by its ability to sing, tell stories with intonation, and keep a conversation going even if I occasionally interrupt it.

The best part? Chat mode will be free for everyone!

Plus, the API will be available at half the cost of Turbo, with five times the usage limits and twice the speed. We’ll start getting access to this amazing tool in the coming weeks.

They also hinted at real-time search features, but this wasn’t included in the final demo.

• By the way, Apple is considering a partnership with Open.AI

Their goal is to make ChatGPT available on iPhones, starting with iOS 18, which will open up a whole range of AI-powered possibilities for Apple smartphone device owners.

For context, there have already been discussions that Siri “doesn't measure up” by modern standards and needs a “brain transplant.