Search Disrupted Newsletter (Issue 1)
Updates on Hubspot, OpenAI, Reddit and Google.
If you’re going to steal a content strategy, you might as well steal from the best, which is why I recommend watching this video (that I made) on how Hubspot is responding to changes in the AI world.
As a bonus in it, I also disagree with nearly all of the SEO community.
Google accidentally exposed some of their future Gemini AI Search features in an MKBHD video on Samsung’s prototype Android XR headset.
It’s an interesting search + command interface that will be in some form on all Android devices in the near future.
There’s been much talk about the new Deepseek AI model, and concerning AI search, the two things to think about are:
Short term: It’s already the top free app in the Apple App Store (knocking ChatGPT out of the top spot). This demonstrates a tremendous appetite for AI search out there, and because it’s so “in-app,” much of it is entirely dark for analytics tools.
Long-term: What’s most interesting is that it’s not “better” at search than ChatGPT or Google, but it’s much cheaper and more portable. “Distilled” (shrunken) versions of it can even be easily run on a Raspberry Pi or your laptop.
We will inevitably have personal AI models doing “search” for us off our devices in the future.
Reddit, which Google has prioritized in search for results, has now turned around and started competing directly for search traffic with the launch of its “Reddit Answers” search engine.
Our long cold days of having to type site:reddit.com in Google to get decent results are over.
Slightly more seriously, this is the start of a more significant AI trend enabling every social + media platform to become a Google search competitor.
There’s no good definition of an “Agent” in the AI world, but it gives people a lower stakes thing to argue about online than all the bad stuff happening in the world, so that’s nice.
I mention this as many “Research Agents” out there are being released that may have a significant impact on the search world.
When you hear the term “Research Agent,” you should think, “This thing is going to do the Googling for me,” which has implications for:
- Analytics tools
- Your funnel
- How you present your content
OpenAI released their “Operator” to folks on the $ 200-a-month plan this week, but Perplexity and Google have similar projects.
In a test I did with Google’s “Gemini Advanced 1.5 Pro with Deep Research” (what a clean, straightforward product name) - it did 70 individual searches of different websites on my behalf in a few minutes and then summarized the results.
Do those count as “search volume”? Should they be counted as “visitors”? Is it worth trying to rank for terms in these searches?
That’s it for this week,
Thanks,
Mike
p.s. I’m doing a free online workshop with the fabulous Jessica Malnik on “What No One’s Telling You About AI & Content Marketing” on February 5th. If you’re reading this, you’re one of the first to know about it, so there should still be room.
Sign up at https://www.crowdcast.io/c/q7xxeuyy3lm3
p.s. It would really help me out if you could Follow me on LinkedIn