Your Weekly Update Wednesday, April 19, 2023
Larry and Sergey, the Google founders, are rumored to have gone from beach to boardroom in a shocking return to work. This can only mean one thing for Google - they're not taking the threat to their business model lying down.
Google just announced their new project, Magi, aiming to add new AI-based features to the existing Google Search. The project, involving more than 160 Google employees, is expected to roll out as early as next month to a subset of users. One of the main goals of Project Magi is to enable searchers to complete transactions, such as purchasing products or booking flights, directly within the search results. Additionally, they're building an entirely new search engine to disrupt themselves for an AI-first world.
This means that marketers and SEO experts may need to adapt their strategies to ensure the products and services they're marketing are prominent in these transaction-enabled search results and that their businesses are using a point-of-sale or e-commerce platform compatible with Google transactions (once ready). Otherwise, they'll be left in the dust. We've seen this happen in the past, such as with Southwest Airlines not being shown on Google Flights, although that was more of a business decision than compatibility-driven.
It's too soon to say what kind of impact this will have on local search results, which is what we focus on, but we have some ideas:
Google will use its AI to catch spam much better. We already know they used AI & machine learning to remove more than 20M fake Google profiles in 2022, to stop an image spam attack, and to fight fake reviews. We think they'll continue to get better at this over time.
Google will penalize businesses that use AI-generated graphics on their business posts as they are not authentic.
Google will get better at discovering backlink farms and private blog networks and will penalize businesses that use them.
Our biggest wish is that Google launches a chatbot for when their AI accidentally suspends a valid Google Profile so that we can get them live again in minutes instead of days or weeks. (Feel free to borrow this idea if you'd like, Google readers & crawlers)
It seems that for now, Google isn't releasing their own AI tools for Google Business Profiles, so good thing we did!
The newest version of our Google Business Profile AI Chrome Extension (ProfilePro) is now live on the Chrome Store. If you haven't tried it out yet, there's no better time than the present. You can learn more about it here.
We're giving newsletter family a month of our premium plan on us! Just enter the code below when asked to upgrade. It's valid until this Friday at 11:59 pm PST & only for the first 1,000 people!
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Here's our shiny new video for it:
Our latest version is translated into more popular languages, has all beta version bugs fixed, and has already helped hundreds of businesses improve their SEO & respond to reviews with the click of a button! Download ProfilePro Chrome Extension
Looking forward to the day AI takes your job, but you keep getting paid? Our services can give you that feeling:
Google Business Profile management services
Listings management software
Reviews management software
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Google Business Profile AI tool
The best part? Everything can be 100% white-labeled
Check out our guide on every possible ranking strategy for Google Business Profiles!
Google Updates You Should Know About
Google updates their algos regularly, and we check and then digest them for you. Here are the latest ones local marketers should know about:
You can find details on all algo updates here.